Engaging Tertiary Education Equity Students in an Information Age

Australian universities face significant challenges in a super complexity and technologically driven higher education platform. Recent debates revealed contradictory perspectives regarding the types, quality and accessibility of support provisions available to equity students. This is important because research has found that support services are fundamental to the success in this cohort of students.

However, there is limited research in what support provisions would best serve this group of students in an information age. Using Berstein’s and Tinto’s theoretical concepts, this study aimed to address the above question through a multifaceted methodology (e.g., qualitative approach-interviews, documentary analysis, archival analysis). Relevant stakeholders (e.g., Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander office, Assistant manager of the student center etc.) were interviewed to determine the types, availability, and accessibility of different service provisions at a large public university in Canberra. Participants were also asked to identify future enterprises that the university has initiated.

Results revealed that the university has met the industry benchmark of good practice for student provisions. However, there were concerns about the accessibility and uptake of some of these support services among equity students. Issues such as lack of a sense of community among equity students, a lack of personalised support mechanism and a lack of engagement were identified. Results also revealed the optimism shared by stakeholders about the development of a new personalised Digital Student Journey (DSJ) platform. An important element of this development is the engagement of students (including equity students) as co-creators. The aim of the university here is to unlock the learning opportunities, spark students’ curiosity and engage students with their immediate and broader community to create an exceptional student learning journey which has become increasingly difficult in an information age.

Kanaeokana: Developing a network to transform education and sustain aloha ʻāina

How might a network approach be utilised to address issues seemingly impossible for individuals to tackle alone?
Established to increase momentum and synergy between multiple organisations through mutual work and shared goals, a network was forged three years ago that today demonstrates progress toward supportive infrastructure, cohesion and collective strength, member engagement, and reach beyond its primary indigenous-serving base.
Kanaeokana is a network of over 70 Hawaiian language, culture, and ʻāina-based (place-based) organisations and schools (preschool through university level) collaborating to develop and sustain a Hawaiian education system. The network’s underlying value of aloha ʻāina, or love of the land, is understood to involve a deeply rooted connection and commitment to the physical and spiritual health of our lands, seas, and skies; an unwavering dedication to the well-being of our lāhui (people, race), and a devotion to protect and support our cultural practices that take place within the embrace of our ʻāina (land).
The development, progress, and future direction of Kanaeokana demonstrate the successes and challenges inherent in the Conference Theme: Working the Boundaries. In this presentation, critical reflection into the health of the network will be explored, including factors that may promote or inhibit network sustainability.

On top of the world or exhausted: Student well-being in university-community engagements

In South Africa, the post-apartheid government emphasises the importance of universities’ community engagement (CE) activities in its societal transformation initiatives, and thus as integral to teaching, learning and research. Through service-learning and volunteer projects (i.e. curricular and co-curricular activities), students are a pivotal link in fostering and maintaining alliances with the community. Thus, as key participants in CE, at this intersection, students represent the university while also affecting and benefitting from the social-educational process. Whereas CE can have many positive outcomes at the personal level for students, e.g. feeling elated, motivated and a sense of personal growth, on the other end of the spectrum they could leave feeling fatigued, overwhelmed and deterred from such engagements in future. A recent doctoral study at a South African university focused on students’ psychosocial experiences related to CE on the individual and interpersonal levels and within the university, community and societal contexts. The study followed a generic inductive qualitative model, akin to grounded theory; consisted of focus groups with students and interviews with university staff and community project representatives; and elicited rich themes, grounded in the data. This study demonstrates that the engagement context presents students with various challenges as they occupy this space between the university and collaborating communities. It therefore emphasises a stronger focus on well-being and structured psychosocial support, including creating spaces where students can critically reflect on their experiences and positionality, and not just on achieving learning outcomes as is often the predominant practice. This presentation will be informative for university staff members involved in teaching and supervising students in service-learning or volunteer programmes, current service-learning students, student project leaders and volunteers, as well as community organisation staff as hosts of engagement projects. It draws attention to the ethics of care in CE, often overlooked in existing processes.

Personal-professional reflections toward a liberatory praxis of research supervision

Widespread managerialist-positivist learning stances in psychology and social science contributes to non-responsive and toxic research curricula. This has been described or theorised by scholars as: the banking model, instrumentalism, silencing, the mind-body split, soul-lessness, methodolatry, the iron cage of methodology, and (recurrent) epistemicide and ontocide. Toxic hidden curricula can be linked to collective intergenerational traumas and histories of oppression, colonisation and conquest. My personal-professional journey of discovery and reclamation during apartheid and democratic South Africa forms the context of this reflexive sharing. I unpack my experiential learnings, unlearnings and emergent understandings as research supervisor of post-graduate students. Critical events are used to illustrate core onto-epistemic shifts, and how these inform my supervision dialogues and decisions.
A research supervision heuristic is presented that unpacks the following: Signals of when a deeper (onto-poetic) research journey is indicated, and when not. Implicit provisional first contracting. Finding fit, acclimatisation and co-creating an emergent enquiry process. Explicit contracting, trust and negotiating differences, similarities, and pseudo-similarities. Incommensurabilities, boundaries and bridges, and discovering common language and connection. Path-making as the co-discovery of research-worthy topics, storylines and methods. Unlearning of tautological pre-determination and foreclosure in mainstream research. Somatic forms of feedback and “whole body listening”. Onto-poetic and onto-relational notions of discovery, research and learning. Edge-walking between the conscious and personal-collective unconscious assumptions, knowledges and histories (when and where appropriate). The recursive and reflective nature of that which is inquired about, selected theories and the inquirers. The conditions for generative research interactions, listening and harvesting. The phases of letting come, crystallisation, closure and letting go. Differences between clinical psychology students and applied research master's students. The ongoing development and maintenance of a non-intrusive, inviting and supportive research supervision environment. This work is located in the context of healing personal histories; finding multicultural belonging; and respecting diversities, agencies and uniqueness.