For presentation and workshop abstracts, please hover your mouse over ‘Abstracts’ on the menu bar. Day 1 abstracts can be found on the sub-page “Symposium Day 1 (13 June 2025)” and Day 2 abstracts can be found on the sub-page “Symposium Day 2 (14 June 2025)“.
Keynote addresses
13 June 2025 (Friday, 10 am SGT, GMT +8)
Asst. Prof. Nadya Shaznay Patel (Singapore Institute of Technology)
Curiosity in the Age of Copilots:
Building Intellectual Agility through Critical Design Futures Thinking
A near-future campus where students off-load every assignment to perfectly helpful bots is not science fiction, it is the path of least resistance. If we allow this dystopian trajectory to continue, higher education will soon graduate impeccably efficient technicians who have outsourced not only writing but wondering. The counter-move is to nurture intellectual agility – a restless, question-driven form of criticality powered by the fundamental human disposition of curiosity. In an era when generative AI is the easiest cognitive crutch, cultivating minds that can pivot, probe and play with ideas is no longer a “soft” skill, it is the very safeguard of human agency.
Drawing on a number of research studies, this keynote introduces a Critical Design Futures (CDF) framework and its instructional approach of using Question Starters to make thinking explicit, visible and accessible. Prototypes designed for redesigning curriculum includes a card game Sparked! and a suite of AI bots, underpinned by the CDF framework. Evidence from interdisciplinary university-level design innovation modules shows that combining dialogic “AI-intellectual sparring” with CDF prompts mindset shifts on critical competence, design dexterity and futures flexibility, hallmarks of agility for the uncertain future.
In an era when routine reasoning is increasingly outsourced to machines, our most human response is to double-down on wondering, probing and imagining. The keynote will close with a call to build humanity-centred, design-driven, futures-oriented curricula that treat curiosity as our most renewable resource.
14 June 2025 (Saturday, 10 am SGT, GMT +8)
Prof. Patricia Alexander (University of Maryland)
CRITICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING: WHAT IS IT? WHY DOES IT MATTER? AND HOW CAN IT BE NURTURED?
Critical thinking is the foundational ability to analyze information encountered in the world by seeking relevant evidence that either supports or refutes that information. This ability is considered a hallmark of an educated and curious mind, capable of making reasoned and reasonable judgments about complex and controversial issues. Despite decades and decades of theory and research on the subject of critical thinking, many perplexing and challenging questions remain about what critical thinking means, why it matters in contemporary society, what factors, such as curiosity and reasoning, matter in its manifestation, and what can educators and educational systems do to promote its development. In this presentation, Dr. Alexander will explore these questions and what such valued processing demands of thinkers in terms of knowledge, strategic ability, socioemotional awareness, and motivation. As she will emphasize, a focus on critical thinking, which has always been core to human learning and development, seems essential in the complex, challenging, and technologically-inundated age in which we live and learn. Finally, Dr. Alexander will address what is required to nurture critical thinking within an educational context, beginning in early childhood and continuing through higher education.