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As postsecondary institutions navigate rapid change driven by technology and innovation, deeper questions about meaning, connection, and purpose in education are coming to the fore. 

At the 2026 , keynote speakers Dr. Dwayne Donald, PhD and Anahi Palomec McKenna invite educators to reflect on how learning experiences shape not only what we know, but how we understand ourselves as human beings.

Drawing on Indigenous traditions and relational worldviews, Donald and Palomec McKenna challenge the disembodied, passive approaches to knowledge that is found in formal education. Their work centers on relational renewal, practices that reconnect learners to themselves, to one another, and to the places and relationships that sustain life.

Donald is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, and Palomec McKenna is a student at the same university. The pair will lead a keynote address titled: “On the emergence of meaning: Knowledge experiments that honour relational renewal” on day one of the conference that will run from April 28-30. 

Ahead of their appearance, Donald and Palomec McKenna share the influences that shape their work, the role of relational renewal, and what it means to create learning environments where people can feel more fully human.

Q: How would you describe your keynote topic to someone who doesn’t know anything about your work/research focus?

We are interested in the ways in which experiences with knowledge and knowing influence how we understand ourselves as human beings. A concern that we share has to do with the mostly disembodied, passive, and informational character of knowledge and knowing that people experience in formal education settings. Such experiences have contributed to the problem of meaninglessness that troubles our public institutions. 

We have shared experience with activating knowledge and knowing as living entities that can be put in motion in healing ways when the conditions for such experiences are made possible. To us, knowledge and knowing experiments are those immersive healing experiences that wake up something inside of us that has been put to sleep as we have become formally educated.

 

Q: What made you want to lead the research/work that you are currently involved in? 

kĂŞhtĂŞ-aya Bob Cardinal of MaskĂŞkosihk Enoch Cree Nation has been a tremendous influence on the quality and character of this research and our presentation. When Bob shares guidance and wisdom in relation to meaningful experiences with teaching and learning, he often emphasizes the importance of healing practices that enhance well-being. 

Many years ago, Bob shared this wisdom insight: The most important thing that you can do in your life and work is connect people with the many gifts that exist in the place where they live. When you can connect people to those gifts, it becomes part of how they understand themselves as human beings. This connection guides them to do what they can to protect those gifts. This is how we become real human beings—when we understand ourselves as unified by our shared interest in honouring what makes life possible and sustains us.

 

Q: What role does relational renewal play in education alongside shifts related innovation and pedagological and organizational shifts?

Our view is that much of what happens in formal education settings reflects the ongoing predominance of colonial culture. 

For us, the emergence of meaning becomes possible when people are guided to realize for themselves how they have come to embody colonial forms of relationship denial in their daily lives. Since colonial forms of relationship denial cause fragmentation, disassociation, and imbalance within human beings that are subjected to such practices, practices of relational renewal involve repairing the relationships that have been denied and renewing them in more ethically relational ways. In a practical sense, this requires carefully attending to the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects of a person in ways that reintroduce and reconnect them to each other. 

People often experience this wisdom understanding as a healing process of gradually being pieced back together so that they feel more fully human. This healing arises as they are repeatedly and consistently engaged in knowledge experiments that activate all four parts of them in balanced and interconnected ways.

 

Q: What can conference attendees expect from your keynote address?

We will share multiple stories of the struggle to find meaning and seek out ways to align ourselves with the many networks of human and more-than-human kinship relations that enable life and living.