Call For Proposals
The ACAA Professional Development Committee is excited to invite you to submit a presentation proposal for Advising as Practice and in Practice: A UO Advising Conference. The conference will take place on February 6th, 2026, which is Friday of Week 5 of winter term.
We have chosen the theme of “Advising as Practice and in Practice” because we are hoping to consider proposals on a diversity of topics:
If advising is a practice, how are you practicing it? What elements of your practice(s) do you think are worth sharing with other advisors in the UO community? What do you think are some best practices in advising (or in student success work more broadly?) What kinds of practices serve specific populations of students better than others? What practices do you seek to teach your students to deploy as they navigate the institution?
Advising is also practice: we are all learning from each advising interaction and are trying to do better next time (and so are our students!). What insights emerge if we think about our advising and student success work in this way? What are some things that you have tried, and what have you learned from your successes or failures? How might thinking of advising as practice help us grow and evolve as advisors? How does practicing (in either sense) lead to flourishing?
Finally, we want this conference itself to be practice. We are hoping that you will view it as a lower-stakes entrée into submitting proposals to regional or national conferences. We are also hoping that the experience of presenting to an audience composed of your colleagues and friends in the UO advising community will allow you to build confidence in your presentation skills—and to give you the freedom to make and learn from mistakes.
In keeping with these goals for the event, we are accepting a variety of different presentation formats, since regional and national advising conferences offer opportunities to make a range of different kinds of presentations. We plan to shape the event around the proposals we receive, and so we welcome proposals for: talks (~20 minutes + 10-minute Q&A), poster presentations, panels, roundtables, workshops (~50 minutes + 10 minutes Q&A), etc.
To submit a proposal, please fill out this Qualtrics form: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3qRCFSnD0ctdiAK
If you have questions email Sam Smith at ssmith44@uoregon.edu.
Joint submissions are welcome!
The deadline to submit a proposal is Thursday, December 18th, 2025
FAQ for Advising as Practice and in Practice: A UO Advising Conference
Q: Can I propose a session that is longer than the time specified in the Call for Papers?
A: Absolutely! We understand that for some folks, the main benefit of this conference is having the opportunity to practice a session that they want to present at a national or regional conference and that thus might have a much longer runtime than the 20-30 minutes we suggested. Our goal is to create an event that helps everyone achieve their goals! Please specify the length of time you envision needing for your session and we will work with you on the logistics.
Q: The Call for Papers asks me to identify my research question and methods. Does that mean that I can only propose a presentation about a research project? What if I don’t have a research question or method?
A: Fair question! No, please do not feel limited to proposing research projects for this conference. Many conference presentations within higher ed focus more on describing an innovative program or practice than on reporting on a formal research project. Even those presentations, though, have implicit or explicit questions and methods that drive them. Think of the “question” as the problem you were trying to solve by implementing your practice (i.e. “I’ve noticed that students frequently don’t understand how to identify whether a course counts for the core ed, and I wondered why that was and what advisors might be able to do to help.”) Then, for methods, tell us about the program you designed or the practice you implemented (i.e. “I designed a tip sheet that our advisors could hand out to students during their meetings explaining the iconography around the core ed.”). And finally, be sure to give us some sense of the outcome! (i.e. “Students reported to me and to other advisors in the office that the core ed was much easier to understand now.”). If you have a formal study, or a survey with results, great! But you don’t have to have those kinds of formal pieces of research for your presentation to be helpful, engaging, and interesting.