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The need for strong student voices
How can Australian universities involve their diverse range of students in the decisions that impact their education?
Sally Varnham interviewed by James Wells
In Australia, student engagement in university decision-making is patchy. That’ s how the University of Technology Sydney’ s professor Sally Varnham describes it, and that’ s what she hopes to change after her report to the federal Department of Education is published.
Varnham’ s project began at the Office for Learning and Teaching, which had its funding cut and redirected to the Department of Education in the last federal Budget. By working with the sector, Varnham is seeking to establish a set of principles that outline how universities can effectively involve students in the decisions that impact their education.
And there are pockets of good practice out there, Varnham says. This includes student course representatives at an increasing number of institutions such as the Australian National University. Another example she points to is Charles Sturt University’ s student leadership conferences. However, most student involvement comes after the executives have made up their minds.
The counterpoint to Varnham’ s case is the argument that universities need to shed some of their bureaucracy and become quick and responsive to survive an age of digital disruption. In other words, they need to corporatise.
Varnham says this is all well and good but universities need to work with students.
To do this, she says, universities should come together and define what effective student engagement with the university executives actually looks like.
Campus Review sits down with Varnham to discuss how Australia might catch up with the overseas higher education systems she sees as leaders in this area.
CR: Why is it important that the sector has a nationally defined set of principles when it comes to student engagement?
SV: There were three prongs to the project, and the first was what happens overseas. Second was looking at what happens in Australia currently. We surveyed Australian universities and Australian student leaders to get their reality and their perceptions of student engagement, student representation. Then we identified some case studies – we actually had 10 case studies – then we ran a project. Really what came out of the Australian research was that there was a huge amount of interest in the sector. There’ s a lot of momentum for the idea. Looking at what happens overseas can be of huge benefit to [ Australian ] universities in terms of actually providing what students want and being in touch with their student cohorts and making decisions that involve the students authentically so that they’ re not out of touch.
There are huge benefits in terms of course enhancement and everything else that goes with what a university provides. And also huge benefits for students, because for students it is a way of developing all the things that we, as universities, should be developing in students – leadership, innovation, critical thinking and citizenship – by involving students in decision-making.
If we’ re not doing it, we’ re missing this opportunity to not only be involved in the students’ learning and teaching in their disciplines, but also in their whole personal professional development.
We need to have a national collaboration and agreement because there are all these things happening in universities around Australia.
I talk about the‘ what, why and how’ in terms of student representation. The‘ what’ is understanding what student engagement in university decision-making is. It’ s important that we reach an agreement on what that is because people have a whole lot of different ideas across universities. There’ s a whole movement of students as partners in the classroom which is to do with involving students in their self-directed learning and working with students in curriculum development and working in the classroom.
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