The Maple League Teaching and Learning Committee warmly invites you to our Better Together event: Taking an Ecosystemic Approach to Flourishing: How We Are Truly "Better Together” Amid Rupture with Dr. Jessica Riddell (Bishop’s University).

 

Live on Zoom – Register here

 

March 2026 marks the two-year anniversary of Hope Circuits entering the world. Since its publication, the work has travelled farther than ever imagined, moving through more than seventy colleges and universities and over fifty associations across Canada, the United States, Ireland, UK, and beyond. Along the way, it has become less a book than a listening practice: a way of standing inside institutions at a moment of profound rupture and asking what still matters, what still holds, and what might yet be rebuilt.

This talk reflects on what those travels have revealed about higher education’s democratic purpose in a time when public trust in institutions is fraying. What is clear: higher education is more important than ever, doing critical work of keeping a society available to itself when the future is uncertain. Guided by Václav Havel’s insistence that hope is the willingness to work for something because it is good rather than guaranteed, this session explores where higher education may be headed. Not toward grand solutions, but toward ecosystems of accompaniment, imagination, and courage. Together, we will ask how institutions might remember what they are for, even, and especially, in conditions of rupture and collapse.

 

Dr. Jessica Riddell is the founder of Hope Circuits Institute, a think tank dedicated to systems re-wiring and renewal in the post-secondary sector.

She is a Full Professor of Early Modern Literature in the English Department at Bishop’s University (Quebec, Canada). She holds the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence; in this capacity, she focuses on systems-change in higher education that fosters human flourishing; in her research, teaching, leadership, and administration, she participates in a wide range of conversations at the national and international levels about how universities fulfil the social contract to a broader society.

Dr. Riddell seeks to build communities and ecosystems animated by a generosity of spirit with a focus on mentorship, leadership, and a commitment to support established and emerging learners and scholars in the pursuit of knowledge creation and sharing.

 

 

 

If you have any thoughts or questions, please contact me at jlopez@acadiau.ca.