Cultivating Connection: Inclusive Learning & Teaching Event

Shamika: I like to tell stories too, Catherine. One of the things I say is when I see people who may or may not be doing what I am comfortable doing and being, I say, you do you, you be you. That means as long as you do not disrespect anyone else, and as long as you're respectful and you don't exclude anybody else, you do you. I think that's a principle that I feel we should value. We can't expect everyone to do what we want to do.
I'm going to tell a story. I'm a practising Buddhist, married to a Catholic, from a strong Catholic family. When we first married, it was chaos—are you going to convert? And I would say, no, I'm not going to convert. For equality purposes, one child will be baptised and one child brought up as a Buddhist. So that's what we do. We go to temple together, we go to church together. But you do you, I do myself, but we don't exclude. I need to practise what I preach, and that was one of the biggest values. We are all so different, and you do you and respect.
Another quick story: recently I thought, oh, I am so EDI, I am so equitable and so good, but I was so wrong recently. I normally do 10-minute meditations every morning, and I would be rejecting voices that sounded young. Why? In my mind I was consciously, unconsciously thinking, oh, young people are not as wise, so I can't listen to someone leading me in meditation. I did not understand that was a bias, that's wrong. Wisdom does not come from age. I had to really reflect personally—Shamika, I'm so disappointed with yourself. You really need to learn. You need to consciously, every day, think what have I considered normal that is acceptable, but be aware that I need to continuously unlearn and learn and be willing to be wrong because I am human. We are all human in this room. The value is to acknowledge our biases, that we do wrong, intentionally or unintentionally. If you live by the value, no one is perfect, but practise to learn and commit to being better.

Alyce: Would you like to share with us what values you believe are particularly important for us to hold on, particularly in the period of change, to nurture inclusion moving forward?

Yasmine: Sure. And I'm conscious that I'm a big giant head in the room. Can you all hear me? Yes. It's always tricky coming up after Shamika; she always shares so many valuable stories with us. As she was talking, I was thinking around the idea of self-reflection, which is something that I think in our team we've regularly started to adopt a lot more—thinking about what are the practices that we would like others to start to learn from us, but also that we are learning from them as well, that lived experience, that sharing of lived experience.
If I go back to the idea of which values, and I think at the moment with all the change that's happening, actually I've got three scribbled down in front of me. Three of the values that are really highlighted at the moment for me are the idea of transparency, the idea of empathy, and the idea of being and showing that we can be vulnerable. Sharing our experiences with others and learning from each other, having open communication with each other in various ways—it doesn't always have to be face-to-face. You can see I've dialled in online, it's school holidays, so a bit of a nightmare for me to get to campus today. Showing those types of traits, and sharing those traits in each other, helps then to find those common goals and those common visions that we can work towards in our learning and teaching. That's not just the staff sharing those, it's actually being open to sharing and learning from students that we're working with as well.
I think there's so much that we can learn from the generations that are coming through the university. There are certainly new things that are happening that, as staff, we can't always stay on top of. So being open to all of those changes and being willing to learn from others. And as you might expect, you might hear from us, being open to building an inclusive culture, but using those principles to build that culture and really basing that on ethical principles that we all know and are taught generally at a young age. But sometimes you forget the times have changed as well.

Alyce: Thanks, Yasmine. Summer, is there anything you'd like to add on that one, particularly around values and things we can hold close to inspire a more positive inclusive future?

Summer: Yeah, so for those that—I assume you introduced me in my absence, so apologies. I'm a Yorta Yorta woman, so all of the work that I do is focused and centred on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which obviously intersects with people with a disability, a whole range of things. For me, one of the values that I look for, particularly in non-Indigenous allies, is resilience. People always talk about how resilient we are as Aboriginal people. We shouldn't have to be so resilient. Often we see non-Indigenous people, when we give them some feedback, do one of two things: they take it on board and say, "Right, I heard you. That's great." That's the ideal. Sometimes they go back into their shell and think, well, this is too hard. So resilience is really important.
I want to pick up on a point that Yasmine made and Shamika may have made as well—openness. Open dialogue and communication is really important. Being open is about listening. My mum always said there was a difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is the actual physical act, and listening is the genuine listening and the deep listening. The value of listening is something that I really believe in. Doesn't mean I always like what I hear, but it's like Yasmine said, it's about going away and reflecting on that as well.
I want to pick up again on what Yasmine said—reflective practice, it's an ongoing experience. Every individual is an individual. What may work with other people doesn't necessarily work with everybody. For me, when I'm working and thinking about inclusive practice, in what I like to see as my own practice, but how I'd like other people to interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including myself, is to be reflective. That's really it for me.

Alyce: Thank you so much. I think there are some common things emerging here in terms of openness, transparency, as well as empathy. People have given examples of empathy, but also building partnership with students. In terms of listening, listening to what we hear from everyone, but also that inner dialogue, I think in your experience, Shamika, that you shared with us around the conversations that we have as we're reflecting on the way that we interact. So thank you.

Summer: I've just seen Amy walk into the room, Amy Bestman. Amy Bestman and I worked together. She is the Academic Program Director of the Master of Public Health. Amy took that on after its development. One of the things that I was really inspired by was the public health team at the University of Wollongong. Trish, the former VC, required us to redo our whole Master of Public Health, which I can tell you is not a small feat. It was a painful experience, but a very good experience. I think we've ended up with a better Master of Public Health for it, particularly post-COVID.
One of the things that really inspired me was my colleagues' willingness to work with myself and other Aboriginal colleagues to improve the Indigenous content within the curriculum. That required them challenging themselves in terms of their knowledge base, getting outside of their comfort zone. Myself and Nadia Neal, who's another Aboriginal woman who works in the School of Social Science, worked with every single subject coordinator. Some of them were already on board and it was great, and that was fabulous. They were there and we were just levelling up what they were doing, and others were kind of new to the space and had to be open to the fact that their base knowledge was really low. That's okay, by the way, but the fact that they were open to that—there was not a single subject coordinator who wasn't open to talking to us. They could have made meetings and cancelled them or just avoided my emails, which is always a possibility, although I probably would have tracked them down anyway. Let's be honest. But I have to say that was really inspiring. I really was inspired by that.
If I can add one more, and I've just looked at Josh over here. He was the former Associate Dean, Education. When he was in that role, he worked with us really closely as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the whole faculty. Because of his advocacy—he gets really modest about this, but we couldn't have done it without you. That's the point: having allies in the space. We now have a position on the Faculty Education Committee that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, and because of that, we were able to get one in the Faculty Research Committee and also the Graduate Research Committee. Josh really took it up for us and advocated, and that level of inclusiveness and that willingness just to go into bat for us really meant we got an opportunity that we may not have always had.

Alyce: Yasmine, are there some experiences you'd like to share that have inspired you, some practices that you thought, "Yeah, this is a challenging one," because there were quite a few, and I thought, oh, maybe if I group them all together as opposed to singling out particular ones.

Yasmine: We're all encouraged to try and include diversity and inclusion in our approaches to student learning. We're all encouraged to do that in our peer learning as well, so amongst our staff members. We're also encouraged to celebrate diversity.
In my role, I've had some conversations with the various teams that I've worked with around how equity, diversity and inclusion are on the radar. What came up there was actually quite interesting, and I guess we're from Science, Medicine and Health, so a very science-driven approach to evaluating things, where the thought was to look straight at the content being delivered. Is the content being delivered going to reflect our future graduates? Do we want our future graduates going out into the workforce knowing particular things?
As a person with a lived experience of disability, for me, that was really challenging the space of stigma and challenging the space of feeling a little bit uncomfortable in how we approach things, because there have been some shifts in the way that we work with various diversity groups. We're all aware of these things, but for some people they feel more comfortable than others. I think challenging that willingness to feel uncomfortable, but also having that willingness to open up and give new things a try.
What I was referring to before about the very "science-driven" approach: there were some topic areas that had been addressed always from a very Western scientific lens, because that's the way it was always done. A few people in the teams that I worked with had unpacked the approaches that were being delivered and found it was always the same types of textbooks being used, the same types of resources being delivered. There had been very few challenges around who the authors of these were. There were some various stereotypical deliveries of resources happening across some of the disciplines. On the flip side, other disciplines were going for more of a case-based approach to learning, where the cases were, again, very stereotypical, very Western. Challenging those prospects and trying to update our content, our resources, our textbooks, and even our ways of delivery to include new approaches.
Just last week I was walking with somebody who had created a new resource where they had both braille and written word for delivery of content for younger children. It meant that the children who were blind could work with their parents and their parents could engage with the story at the same time—just thinking outside the square a little bit and not thinking that we have to always do things the way things were always done. So it's a bit of a roundabout way of answering your question, but yes, lots and lots of ways and lots and lots of inspiration that I've seen, and I think we've got some amazing practices already happening on campus that we can learn from.

Alyce: Thank you so much, Yasmine. We might close the loop with our panel to Shamika for some final reflection from things that you've seen that have inspired you.

Shamika: Thanks. I just want to first ask the audience: have you ever gone with an intention to do the right thing by your students but it didn't work out or backfired on you? That is normal human nature, right? We go with good intentions into our teaching spaces, but how we are perceived and the blind spots we have may not allow us to get the outcome we wanted. In the Indigenous space, as a non-Indigenous person, staff in our faculty, we have sometimes made mistakes. We've made horrendous mistakes where we may have not made our students feel safe. The best part of it was when I acknowledged it—I run to Woolyungah and ISU and I say, "Oh, we made a mistake. This has happened. Please help us. What are we going to do?" I felt safe enough to go and disclose. We made mistakes. This was what the academic was trying to do, this was the intention. They had great intentions, being good, doing good, but it potentially didn't work the way it was meant to. Having safe spaces where you are not judged and it is all about learning, making you think, "Yeah, it's okay, we'll hold you, we'll take you and guide you through." It's about relationships. I felt safe for our staff in the faculty where we can make mistakes, though we have good intentions.

Alyce: Thank you. And again, for being so open with sharing that. I think all of the threads of experience that have been shared in this discussion really do highlight the importance of really listening, empathising, but also that humility that comes with being, feeling safe to make mistakes, but also to appreciate that you don't know everything and still be curious to learn and to grow, and to provide opportunities and access to multiple ways of doing things that cater for the different ways that we do see and engage.

Alankaar: I am going to—what I’ve brought with me is not really a theoretical, formal academic presentation. I’ve just brought some reflections and thoughts, in the spirit of dialogue. So that’s what I’m going to try and do today here: just reflecting on our subjectivities in teaching and learning spaces.
As I was thinking about this presentation, this talk this morning, I was reminded of about a month ago, the first class that I attended after the so-called March for Australia rally across Australia. It was weighing heavily on me in terms of: what does this mean? What does this mean for us in teaching and learning contexts? What does this mean for me personally as a person of colour who’s teaching into that space? What does it mean for students who are here, particularly for students of colour who are in this space? What are they thinking? How is this sitting with them? Is this weighing heavily on them the way it is weighing heavily on me? What about all students in this community?
Those are the thoughts that I had, and I’ve had similar thoughts at different points in time in terms of what’s happening around us. I remember thinking very similarly after the Voice Referendum. I remember thinking similarly approaching and following the postal vote on same-sex marriage. How do we make sense of that as learners and teachers is, I think, an important project for us to engage with.
Before I go further, I think it’s important for me to acknowledge some of the epistemic perspectives that I sit with, or key ideas that inform me when I think about this. I think it’s very important to reject the notion that knowledge is simply transmitted in the classroom space, beamed out of the instructor and into the students. That idea of the knowledge transmission model of education has been soundly rejected for good reason. It’s important to acknowledge that knowledge is not transmitted, but actively produced and constructed while we are all there, in real time. It is an intersubjective process.
What I mean by that, how I understand that, is that we bring our subjectivities into that space. We don’t leave who we are at the door when we enter the classroom. We bring with us our linguistic backgrounds, our political values, our cultural, ethnic, and racial experiences and backgrounds. We bring our sexualities and genders. We bring everything—who we are outside the classroom—we don’t leave it at the threshold when we enter that space. So, when we enter that space, the knowledge that we are able to produce or not able to produce is profoundly influenced by those subjectivities that we bring into the classroom with ourselves.
In that spirit, it’s also important to acknowledge that the binary of the teacher and student is a bit of an artificial dichotomy. None of us are pure teachers and none of us are pure students. We have a bit of a role where we are both teachers and learners. Of course, there is a primary role, where some people are primarily teachers, given various factors, and similarly, some are primarily students, but we wear different hats all the time.
So, how do we cultivate classroom spaces that allow for our multidimensional, complex, messy selves to show up and engage in conversations that advance equity and justice? That is a question I think about often. To some extent, the answer lies in acknowledging and recognising that reality. Often in our classes, especially in social sciences and humanities, we are trying to understand our social world, trying to address social problems and issues. When we are trying to make sense of the social world, we often talk about these social issues and contexts as if they exist somewhere out there. I think it’s really important to acknowledge that the reality of all those social contexts, problems, and issues exists within the classroom as much as it exists elsewhere.
So, how do we move from thinking about reality as something that’s out there to recognising it as in here? In that respect, the idea of reflexive pedagogy offers some guidance. How I understand reflexive pedagogy is as a consistent and continued engagement with critical thinking. That means being continually self-aware, understanding and examining the social world through our lived experiences and shared knowledges, acknowledging that we bring into the class our social identities, the intersections of social identities on top of which we sit, our knowledges, our lived experiences, and the meanings that we make of those lived experiences into the classroom space.
It also requires a reconfiguration of the power differential between teachers and students, recognising that students are not just learners, but active knowledge producers. In that sense, it also challenges the traditional notions of what education needs to be and look like. In some sense, it’s also a decolonial project—thinking of education that way.
A final point I want to raise is that the idea of reflexivity in pedagogy is not simply to acknowledge our social identities in terms of preparing a laundry list of those identity markers—who we are in terms of our gender, ethnicity, race, class—not a laundry list, but thinking about how these identities show up in the learning space, and how they influence the knowledge, the intersubjective knowledge, that we are able to produce or not able to produce. How does this influence what stories are shared, what values are brought in, whose voices are represented? And also, what stories are not shared, what experiences are not discussed, what values are not brought in, and what voices are not represented in this space? Thinking about it collectively, that will change what knowledge we are able to produce or not able to produce.
Finally, these are the questions that I have, and I thought I’d bring these questions to this group to collectively ponder over. Think about these questions that may offer some guidance about how we make sense of all of this: How do we cultivate classroom cultures of critical examination of power, privilege, and oppression that includes an examination of our own subjective experiences and locations? How do learning community members call in others with an aim to advancing inclusivity and equity in the learning space and in the world? Which pedagogical tools and activities align well with this idea of reflexive pedagogy?
With that, thank you so much for your attention, for giving me a listen, and I look forward to the conversation that we are going to have this morning. Thanks again.

Sue: I want to welcome everybody who's here online and everybody who's here in the room. I'm going to talk a bit about our research project that we did because we were thinking about what it's about. So, I'm from a regional campus of the University of Wollongong. What is it? What we found, or what we had noticed, is that our students have remarkable retention. Regional campuses, you might not know this at UOW, have really good retention—above what regional students nationwide do. So, we wanted to know: why is that? What are we doing that's achieving that, but also, what are our students doing and experiencing that's contributing to that?
From the research, we found there was a culture of support and a culture of community on our campuses that was supporting that. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about that. Our students have a really strong sense of belonging, really good participation in learning development workshops—they come to the workshops that are run on campus—and high academic achievement. They're doing really well, despite the fact that all of them are regional and/or rural and remote. About 65% are first in family to go to university, about 10% Indigenous, 50% low SES, and about 3% disability. These are people who traditionally don't do well at university, people who traditionally don't express a sense of belonging to university, don't feel like they fit.
So, we wanted to look at why our students feel like they do belong. What are we doing that's contributing to that? We asked about the academic, social, and environmental practices of regional campuses that support student success. We did focus groups on each campus with students and staff, and then had a look at that. I'm going to talk using some of the voices of the students because I don't want to talk just about what we think or do—I want to see what the students think about what's supported their success.
One of the things that came through very strongly was that there was a culture of support. When we asked them to describe their campus, they talked about support that they had, that they felt like, "Oh, someone's always looking out for me. I know that if I have questions, there's someone who will answer them, and it's okay to ask those questions. I feel like I'm known," all of those things. So, a culture of support—and that's quite deliberately built. The campus manager is talked about here as saying it's all about what's going to work for the students.
On Bega Valley campus, where I'm from, we have a student support meeting once a month where all the staff—academic and professional—come together to talk about what's going on with the students and what we can do to support them. What's coming up? Who can we be looking after? So, it's thinking about that and that happening all the time. Bega is actually a place of connection and of education and has been for thousands of years. That's a really important foundational thing for us. When we've talked to the elders from the Djiringanj people, who are the traditional custodians of the land in Bega, that's what they've taught us about that history of education and of connection.
The Djiringanj people are in Bega, Thaua people down at Eden, Dhurga people up at Bateman's Bay. I think Thaua people go up into the mountains as well, up on the Monaro Plain. All of those people coming together in Bega in order to connect and as a first basis of education. So, that's a really important foundational thing for our campuses.
That meant that, when we think about what we are doing, the culture of community was really important too. That's something that's come before the university's been there, but it's something that we've continued. When we asked people to describe what the campuses were about, they talked about a culture of community. They used the word "community," but they also talked about family and belonging. They talked about being known and how important that was to them succeeding, how important that was to them feeling like, "Yes, this is a place for me, and it's okay for me to get things wrong and for me to feel things are difficult, because there are other people here who are like me and who also find things difficult." So, that's okay to feel like that.
There are lessons here. Cultural community is felt partly because they're small campuses, with small numbers of people, so it's easy to see and know people. But that doesn't mean that can't happen in a bigger space as well. Today, we're hearing about how you're doing all of that on Wollongong campus in the bigger space. But how important that culture of community is to that sense of belonging.
When we looked at what people were saying, it was actually underpinned by these ethics of care that Joan Tronto talks about. She talks about care as a political thing, not just an individual thing, and really important in higher education as well. These ethics of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, trust, and solidarity—we saw all of that in the way that students and staff talked about what they do.
The thing I want to draw your attention to is the ethic that staff are taking on in terms of attentiveness. Actually making sure that we are there on campus, so that we go to orientation and graduation, and we are there in the kitchen, in the foyer, in the garden, and wherever else. Seeing students and interacting with them means that all the time, when we are interacting, we're also picking up on what's going on so that we are caring about our students in those spaces. That means then the students feel like, "Oh, people know me." For example, I'm in education, but I've met a student in nursing during orientation. I smile at him and say, "How are things going? You just had your prac—how did it go? Where did you go for that?" I don't interact with him in classes, but I interact with him in spaces on the campus. That feeling of belonging comes from attentiveness.
Responsibility—making sure that we are following up with students, looking out for them, and that they know they're cared for where they are. A number of students get picked up just through those conversations incidentally, rather than having to go and make a formal appointment to see learning support or the counsellor. We're interacting with them everywhere we go.
When I come to Wollongong campus, it's such a beautiful space, and you walk past students all the time. There are so many opportunities to connect and interact with them. It's just about taking those opportunities as they come.
There are quite deliberate things that people do to make sure they're available for students. For example, the learning support person talks about making sure they're here at the time that students are here, so they can see and meet with them if needed. Not just working on certain days, but knowing when students are on campus and making sure that's one of their working days. Students feel that wellbeing that comes out of that.
For students, it means they feel like there's always someone they can ask questions of—they don't have to just work it out themselves. They can ask someone just walking past in the kitchen or wherever else. The other thing that happens is the caring with—staff work together, but students work together too. One student said, "There's no way that if someone was crying in the foyer, they wouldn't be mobbed by people checking and making sure they're okay and looking after them." That culture of support and community is there and gets passed down to the students.
Last week, nursing students had a really tough maths exam and they all decided to bring in cakes to support each other. That became a morning tea for the whole campus—"Come and get cake, we've just had this terrible maths exam, but come and talk to us." It became a community event. The fact that these students were bemoaning the maths exam, but could laugh about it and join together and support each other in it, is important.
It's a whole thing—students' belonging, wellbeing, self-efficacy, positive emotions, and engagement are what result from all of that. Just the benefit of being there for our students and being inclusive of them in everything.
I haven't talked much about online, but that's the other experience of regional students—they are largely online for their classes. So, it becomes really important that we are there for them to support them in it, but also that when we do online, we see them and hear them and give them opportunity. Please, people who are online, I'm going to read all the comments that you're putting in the Padlet, but good to have you here with us as well.

Rugare: Thank you very much for the introduction, and also to Annemarie for inviting me to speak today. I greet those in the room, but also those online. Where do I see those online? There's no way to see them. That's okay. Thanks so much for that.
So, I don't have slides. I'm going to use stories. I like stories, and I've got three stories for you.
The first story goes back to my education as a child. I come from Zimbabwe, which is in Africa. In our country, in Zimbabwe, there's a long river called the Zambezi River. It is in between Zimbabwe, where I come from, and Zambia, our neighbouring communities along that river. There's a large waterfall—probably someone knows about that waterfall. Can someone tell me something about that waterfall? One of the largest in the world? I heard something. It's got a colonial name. What's the name? Somebody said it. Victoria. Victoria Falls. Thanks for that. What else do you know about that? Anyone online? Okay, I hope they're hearing me, those who are online.
So, there are three interpretations to the falls. The first interpretation is the African interpretation, which is my interpretation. Its name is Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means "the smoke that thunders." Why? Because there's always smoke or a mist that comes out when water splashes down the falls. It is the spiritual place of the Tonga people, who are found on both sides of the Zambezi River—in Zimbabwe and also in Zambia. For the Tonga people, it has always been part of their life, connected to their culture and philosophies. That's Mosi-oa-Tunya. That's interpretation number one.
Interpretation number two is the Western interpretation. The falls were "founded" or discovered by David Livingstone. They were named Victoria Falls by David Livingstone, and the falls represent a commercial entity. They don't represent spirituality, but they represent tourism. That's the second interpretation.
The third interpretation, which brings me here, is the decolonised interpretation of the falls. Taking a decolonised lens, the falls need to be renamed back to Mosi-oa-Tunya, and their spiritual significance that is founded within the Tonga people should be restored. That's a decolonised lens. They are the custodians of the falls, and that should be recognised. Those are the three interpretations of Mosi-oa-Tunya.
Now, I want to go to my second story, but maybe before that—so I did my education in Zimbabwe. The textbooks, the books, the examinations, talked of Victoria Falls and David Livingstone. If I had given an examination answer that said the falls were always there for the Tonga people and people around them, I would have failed that examination.
Now I'll go to my second story. My second story is about a professor who walks into a classroom and draws a circle on the board. Then they invite interpretations from their students—just an empty circle. What do you think would be the different interpretations, especially here at the University of Wollongong, when we've got students from diverse backgrounds? What would be one or two interpretations of the circle? A face? Yes, thanks for that. What could be another interpretation by the students? I would say inside versus outside—the inside and outside of the circle. Thanks, and you are correct.
I'm proposing that an Aboriginal student would say, "Oh, maybe this represents yaning, or it represents a waterhole, or it represents connections within the community." An African student would say, "Maybe this is Ubuntu, which is community, or the connections that happen within a community." A Western student or a Westernised student would say, "Maybe this is a shape. This is geometry. Maybe it represents emptiness, perhaps nothing else beyond that." Think about what the Indian student would say. Maybe they'll think about spirituality, maybe they'll think about karma, maybe they'll think about connections within the universe. Think about the student from the Middle East. What would they say about that circle?
So that's an illustration of the diversity in terms of knowledges that exist within our classrooms. Now imagine you then give the students an exercise or an assessment or a reading that prioritises one interpretation—maybe "this is geometry, this is a circle." Whose knowledge and culture and philosophy gets valued? Whose knowledge, culture, and philosophy gets erased? Which student among those four or five becomes confident in their learning, who becomes a good teacher, a good practitioner, a good engineer later in life, who will feel valued? It's the student whose interpretation is in the textbook.
Now, for most of the textbooks that we use, if we're not conscious, they carry a Western interpretation of the circle. The Indigenous student's interpretation disappears, and their culture or their epistemology also disappears.
There is theoretical grounding to this. Most of you know the work of Paulo Freire—that's very common, international, global education for liberation, asking questions, including hard questions. That's important. That would be useful in this case. In Uganda, there's a philosopher, an educational philosopher called Dani Nabudere. In Botswana, near where I come from, there's another one called Bagele Chilisa. They talk of Africology. Africology is when all knowledges from different cultures and philosophies are put on the table for the betterment of our students, but also to give us educators the confidence to teach. So that's Africology.
There's also another theoretical basis to this, which is African—and I'm emphasising African to just reflect that there is also good information that comes from Africa. Even when you sit with your African students, Indigenous students, Indian students in the room, acknowledge that. The last philosophical basis is Sankofa. Sankofa comes from Ghana, and it says you always have to look back to be better informed about the present, but also the future.
Lastly, the last story is about what I do in my teaching and learning here at UOW. I've got one minute—I think I should be able to fit it in there. So I use decolonised practices in my teaching and learning at three levels (there may be more): there's decolonised educational practice more generally, then there's decolonised teaching and learning practices, then there's decolonised assessment practices.
I'm happy to be working around a team within social work—it's called the decolonised working party. Langa is part of that team. So we talk decolonisation in our teaching and learning. I'm part of a project that is running currently, an LTC project on decolonised teaching and assessment practices. I've seen some of you in the yarns that we have done. We have done five yarns. We've also done two walks about decolonised assessment practices. The outcome is going to be a protocol, and that protocol on decolonising assessment practices is going to be shared with you all and others in UOW.
Lastly, decolonising is—there are often barriers and gaps and challenges, and I've seen that with students. But these are not barriers or challenges that can't be addressed if we work together. Working with the student is really important. Even us academics—even me, someone coming from a colonised background, working the decolonisation route has got challenges and impediments. But when we walk together—those coming from the colonised and those coming from the colonising—if we work together, we improve teaching and learning for students, and we achieve inclusive practices for your student from Africa, for your Aboriginal student, for your student with a Western background, but also for your student from Asia or the Middle East.
I'm happy to end here. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Alankaar: Really good question. I don't have any advice to offer, but I can share some messy experiences. I think one way in which I try to address that—and I completely acknowledge that these are imperfect and messy ways of trying to achieve that utopian ideal—is that just the geography of the classroom doesn't allow, the sociopolitical context of the classroom doesn't allow for there to be a complete sort of egalitarian, non-hierarchical relationship building.
But even within that context, Rugare mentioned Paulo Freire. I get a lot of inspiration from Freire's work in terms of influencing my own pedagogy, informing my own pedagogy. I actually make it transparent to the students in the beginning about this is my teaching. I discuss my teaching philosophy with the students, and I share this idea of none of us being only exclusively a teacher or a learner. We are all teacher learners and learner teachers, and sometimes we are teacher learners, and sometimes we are learner teachers.
What that means to me—and that, I think, if nothing else, holds me accountable to, "Well, this is how I'm going to approach this classroom, but I'm not going to be the only one running this space." This is a collective learning environment. So I'm also going to need to lean on you to contribute similarly. The experiences with that are variable across every classroom, every context, depending on what's going on. But that's what I try to do: make it transparent to the students so that I'm accountable to them in that sense, and they can hold me accountable as well.

Alyce: Any other reflections from the panel on that one?

Rugare: Yeah, I can just add a few issues. Thanks, Josh, for that. And I do agree with you, Alankaar, that if you make your teaching philosophy clear in your subject early on, that's really useful. I've done that, especially in terms of decolonisation, but also making my classroom inclusive more generally. Often you find students coming to you and getting confirmation: "Oh, so am I okay to do my group work outside, on country?" Then I say, "That's all right." They even come up with suggestions: "This week, you want us to visit community projects around—can we go to the Illawarra Aboriginal Medical Centre? I know we can learn this and that." So allowing students to contribute to our approaches, to our pedagogy, has worked for me. Indeed, the hierarchies are there, and as I said at the end of my presentation, at times even the students feel like, "Oh, my knowledge or my understanding, my culture, shouldn't be in this," especially for international students. Maybe they're just worried about their next shift, or they're just worried that they'll fail the examination. But making it clear that all knowledge is allowed, is available, and your contribution is valued—something that I do.

Alyce: Any other questions in the room?

Lorna: Yeah, I was thinking a lot about what both of you were saying, and Rugare, it's great to catch up, because I think I was the first yarn, I missed all the other ones. But I did something, I think for the first time at the beginning of this year. I actually put—and I'm in physics, I should say, so a bit of an outlier in lots of ways—but I actually put on my site at the banner at the top that my subject strives to be a safe and inclusive space and respectful for everyone. I'm also pre-recording my lectures. I'm not editing out the nonsense. I signed off my last week's with, "There's my arm, and that's my squid." If you watch the lecture, that may not make sense, but I'm not removing it. I'm being authentic. I think that gives my students permission to be authentic, and I know it gives other staff permission to be authentic. Anyway, that's my blah and my squid.

Alyce: Thank you for sharing that with us, Lorna, and I think particularly we appreciate in this environment you sharing it, being so authentic with us around that. In some of the things that have been discussed today by the panel and even in our presentations—around that culture of care, but also being real. Thank you for sharing that with us, because I think we're all kind of saying a similar thing: we want to hold place for what is real and genuine. In doing so, also looking at what isn't here, what isn't being said, what knowledge is there, and which ones are valued in certain ways. So I think this is all a really important thing that we bring to conversations and events like this, to really unpack.

Sue: I think it is possible. One of the things—the regional campuses, in case people don't know, are Bega, Bega Valley, Eurobodalla, Southern Highlands, and Shoalhaven, and they're quite different places. Shoalhaven campus is actually quite large compared to the rest of us. Sam is online and can correct me, but I think it's 200 students, whereas Bega is, I don't know, 130 or something. So it's maybe 250 students at Shoalhaven campus. At that campus, the same things were being said. So it wasn't that, "Oh, this can only happen when there are only 60 people on campus on any one day." It actually happens in bigger spaces. I actually see it happen on Wollongong campus as well. I'm in the School of Education, so I know that my colleagues in education are having those conversations. What's been said by you—you obviously have those relationships with your students as well, and you do as well. So it's that sense of being a person to your students, not being their lecturer or their tutor, being a person. It works on regional campuses. Partly our students work alongside us when we have outreach events to the community. We have kids coming in for In2Uni programmes, and students mentor alongside us with those students with the particular activities. So there's a flattening of the power structure there. I think that it happens at Wollongong too. I do see the culture of support and culture of community happening. I think it happens more in Wollongong within a particular school rather than across faculties, the way that it happens on regional campuses. But that doesn't mean that it can't happen. It just means that you kind of think, "Well, this is the space that the students are in, and that I'm in. We're in the same space, so we absolutely can connect with each other, and we can have a cultural support, and we can have a cultural community within our school or within our programme, or even within our subject." So I think it's definitely possible on larger campuses. I don't think it's something that only has to be in a regional campus.

Alyce: Thank you, Sue. That's an important question. Thanks for that.

Rugare: I think working in social work would be different from other disciplines. What I've seen here at UOW, but also my previous work as an academic in Zimbabwe—social work as a discipline is founded on justice. So empowerment, decolonisation are key components of social work. They're even embedded in the international definition of social work. So in social work, the question will not be about people not wanting to decolonise. Actually, people are asking questions: "What more can we do?" Which is why I said, in our discipline, we've got a decolonisation working party. But I understand in different disciplines, things will be different. Different universities will also be different. I came from the University of Newcastle. Coming here, the decolonisation turn at UON (that's University of Newcastle) is lesser compared to here at University of Wollongong. I started working here in 2017. When I came here, the academics in social work, we were talking about decolonisation, then the school, but also the faculty looking at what the university provides in terms of policies, especially answering the question, "Why decolonise?" Just to search that and look at the reconciliation action plan and other related documents, and even go further to look at the UN—what it says about decolonisation in relation to education, that epistemic decolonisation is important, is crucial. So with that policy framework, I think there's a tool for us to use, even in those disciplines or with those academics who tend to say decolonisation is not important. "It's a thing of the past. It has happened. It's not affecting you, it's not affecting me. It was done by my ancestors." But we know that colonisation is intergenerational. What happened in the past is affecting people today. As you said, you are from the Caribbean, if I heard you right. So those are important issues for me. There are tools that you can use as a starting point: the UN framework on decolonisation, indigenisation. If we're in Africa, we've got the African Union protocols on that as well. If you're here in Australia, there are those protocols as well. At UOW, there are those protocols as well. You check online, you find them. So that's a tool to use to ensure you do that.
But more importantly and more theoretically, it's also important for me to talk a bit about what Bagele Chilisa says about decolonisation. Chilisa is a Botswana scholar, a professor at the University of Botswana. She's renowned in Africa and beyond. Her books are in the library here, and you can get her books on decolonising research, teaching and learning. Chilisa talks about four levels of decolonisation. The first one being number one, where there is paternalistic decolonisation, and number four, where there is more indigenous stuff in there, more decolonisation is happening. That's number one to number four as part of what she calls Africology. As I said before, within those four, in my writing, in my work, I've added two levels. Level number one is level zero, where people don't talk about decolonisation at all. They don't want to hear about it. As you said, they say, "It's nothing. When I go into my classroom, it's fine. I should teach just the way that I teach. Whether I'm teaching an Aboriginal student, an Aboriginal subject, I shouldn't bother." That's level zero. And level five for me is when there's a total decolonisation—difficult to achieve, but in other cases, that has been achieved.
Now, Chilisa talks about third space methodology. Third space is level number three, and it's more acceptable, especially for those who resist decolonisation. Some resist it because they fear there will be a reverse—their own epistemologies, their own knowledges will disappear. Now, third space methodology brings the best from all cultures and philosophies onto the table, and you walk that way. So third space is more acceptable in cases like that. But as I said before, there are also tools from the UN, from UOW, that you could use to support yourself in cases like that.
Okay, thank you. I think that's a question that we will continue to reflect on, because it's a really huge one. Looking at tools in different ways and knowledges that might help us look at that question from different angles is also really important.