Our faculty chair for the 2025 Teaching and Learning Conference is Dr. Jeannette Byrne, Associate Professor, School of Human Kinetics and Recreation, Memorial University.

A Message from the Faculty Chair

I am so pleased to invite you to Memorial University’s Teaching and Learning Conference 2025, to be held on the St. John’s campus and online on April 30 and May 1. I hope you’ll join us to share, connect and explore your everyday as we engage with this year’s conference theme: Inspiring Learning, Innovating Teaching.

Along with the entire conference-planning team, I’m excited to mark Memorial’s 100 years of experience in embracing change and honing our expertise to serve our students’ needs and enhance their learning experiences. The value of the Teaching and Learning Conference comes from both looking back on our prior accomplishments and bringing Memorial’s teaching and learning community together each year to share their expertise and experiences and look forward to the academic year ahead.

Every year, I look forward to attending the Teaching and Learning Conference. For 2025, I can’t wait to further engage with my fellow educators to discuss our ideas and approaches to adopt inclusive content, develop effective assessment methods and strike a balance between content delivery and student engagement. As a conference attendee or presenter, you’ll be empowered to do the same by sharing with and learning from your peers across Memorial’s campuses.

This year’s conference includes keynote addresses by Dr. Sarah Eaton, professor and research chair at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education, and Dr. Isabelle Côté, associate professor at Memorial’s Department of Political Science. We’re excited to offer a variety of conference sessions over its two days including presentations, workshops and round-table conversations.

Please join me and your colleagues at this year’s Teaching and Learning Conference. I can’t wait to learn more together about engaging students, cultivating curiosity, inspiring learning and innovating teaching for Memorial’s learners, today and over our next 100 years.

Dr. Jeannette Byrne
Conference Faculty Chair 2025
School of Human Kinetics and Recreation

About Dr. Jeannette Byrne

Dr. Jeannette Byrne is an associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics and Recreation at Memorial University. She teaches a variety of courses within the School of Human Kinetics and Recreation and recently she has begun teaching in nursing, delivering a course to students at the Centre for Nursing Studies, Faculty of Nursing and the three satellite sites.

As a lover of learning and a passionate educator, Dr. Byrne’s focus is on helping her students reach their full learning potential by striving to optimize the learning environment she creates in her courses. Teaching primarily lab-based courses, she works closely with her various learning facilitation teams to create learning experiences for students that both challenge them, while at the same time supporting them in their academic journey. She views herself as a partner with students in the learning process and everything she does in the classroom is guided by her belief that all students want to learn – the role of teachers is to create an environment that can help to facilitate that learning.

An overarching goal of Dr. Byrne’s teaching is that her students develop a deep understanding of and appreciation for the course material to apply their learning in situations outside the classroom. While she uses many different approaches in her teaching, at the foundation of her approach to teaching is to have students ‘think, process and do.’ Dr. Byrne received the 2018 Memorial University President's Award for Distinguished Teaching and was part of the inaugural Teaching Enhancement Through Scholarly Inquiry (TESI) program at Memorial. Her research program currently focuses on the role that assessment plays in student engagement and learning.