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THE TRIBAL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT WINNERS: MAGDALENA WAJRAK, JASON BARROW AND CAROLINE BISHOP, SCHOOL OF NATURAL SCIENCE, EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY | REPRESENTATIVE: MAGDALENA WAJRAK
CR: What does winning this award mean to you? MW: It is a team effort. We run a program called Old Ways, New Ways at ECU. The program aims to encourage, inspire and give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island students the encouragement and confidence to consider studying science at a tertiary level.
It is just so wonderful to have it recognised that what we are doing is important and that it is working.
For me personally, I have been doing this for quite a long time now – about six or seven years – so being [ acknowledged ] and having programs like this [ acknowledged ] is great.
For me … it’ s also about the fact that I am thinking,‘ We can do this, we can continue.’ Because you always worry about how you can continue to do it. I hope we can continue for as long as possible and one day I am going to be seeing a lot more Aboriginal students doing science. That’ s the vision for me anyway.
This program is now in its second year, why is it so important? I have a personal goal; I would love to see more Indigenous students studying chemistry or teaching.
I hardly ever see any Aboriginal students pursuing a career in chemistry and I was always intrigued as to why that is so. So for me I would like to make them feel like they can do it, and position it as another opportunity they could consider – working in the area of science.
What impact have you seen thus far through this project? Look, it’ s a little bit hard to see the impact in such a short period of time, in terms of more Aboriginal students enrolling in sciences. We hope it will be seen in the next five years or so.
As far as immediate [ impact ], I can tell you that schools are asking us to come back, and [ we have received very positive feedback recently ].
THE DVE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN SCHOOL AND FACULTY MANAGEMENT WINNER: COLLEGE OF ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND COMMERCE MANAGEMENT TEAM, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY | REPRESENTATIVE: SIMON HALL, GENERAL MANAGER COLLEGE OF ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND COMMERCE
CR: Your team won this award for the implementation of a major restructuring, in which you moved to a two-college model starting on January 1, 2015. What did this involve? SH: It was not just a restructure of academic units, but also of our administrative units.
While some universities have implemented change processes solely across administrative structures and processes, and others have implemented change processes within individual academic units, La Trobe identified that in order to revitalise the insitution for another 50 years of teaching, intelletual enquiry and excellence, a broad range of reforms would be required.
The particular part of the universitywide change program that I and my team have been responsible for implementing and seeing through over the next few years has been within what is now called the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce.
Within that, there were two main elements from an academic perspective. We facilitated the transition from three large faculties to one single college.
At the same time, we restructured the professional service models that existed in each of those former faculties into either college-wide professional service offerings or shared services that would provide things such as student administration or marketing to disciplines in those former faculties that are now the college.
What are some of the challenges you have seen throughout this process? I think one of the most significant challenges has been resourcing the body of work to achieve operational excellence at the same time as maintaining busines sas usual in the aftermath of change. You can’ t facilitate this level of change or insight without changing the structure first.
Now that we have people in new positions and have new structures in place, we have the opportunity to lift up those rocks and see what is underneath. There commences the body of work to address things that have either been done inefficiently previously or in a way that is not aligned or consistent with the university’ s strategic goals for the future.
Inevitably you have to get on with business as usual, so you will have a restructured team to support, while also having to address all the opportunities for improvement you have uncovered.
Resourcing that and making sure that staff wellbeing and morale, and all those other aspects of the people side of change, are addressed adequately has been a priority of this management team. An element of that is what our award speaks to.
What do you believe this award acknowledges? This for us acknowledges primarily the management teamwork to facilitate change. This includes all the aspects of change management we normally see in universities: consultation, coming up with the design for new structures and new service delivery models.
But what doesn’ t get talked about so much in the sector is the aftermath – how best to support staff in working with new shared service models and across new team structures.
I believe this award acknowledges a team of people who have gone above and beyond and tangibly demonstrated how to make that work.
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