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The‘ why’ is where we’ ve looked a lot at what happens overseas and then how to put things into practice.
[ Then the‘ how’] – there’ s lots going on, there’ s a lot of interest, but it just seems, and the department seems to have agreed with me by funding me, that it would be really good to undertake an exercise involving all the sector and what it means. That’ s involving everybody from senior management … to all the professional people who are involved with student engagement. A lot of universities now have offices of student engagement, offices of student experience.
[ This is all about engaging ] students in this whole discussion.
How would you say practically it was being implemented? In all sorts of different ways. One example … is a pilot, [ conducted with a university ] law faculty, of starting with course representatives. Some universities already have course representatives – ANU has them as do other universities. Having course representatives means at the beginning of every course in a university the students elect someone to be the representative for their course. It could be their subject or their year group or whatever. [ That person is then ] kind of a conduit between them and the course coordinator or the lecturer or whoever so they can be the voice of students. That way they’ re starting off at the first level of representation.
What we observed overseas is that sometimes there was a career path where students would start off as course representatives, then they’ d move up the system to be representatives on university council, perhaps because they were developing the expertise and the knowledge and the know-how.
The idea was also to try and engage as many students as possible. The challenge that’ s seen overseas, and I see it as a big challenge here, is engaging every student’ s voice – all the cohorts, the under-represented students, the Indigenous and the international students who we have a lot of. In terms of university decision-making, you could probably say they’ re underrepresented. [ Student groups like ] the part-timers, the mature-age, the first-in-family, and the online distance students. Engaging all of their voices is the challenge that’ s seen overseas.
A university that we used as a case study … is Charles Sturt University. They have student representative councils [ across the board ] – they have five campuses and 22,000 online students. [ One of their students ] introduced the Student Leadership Conference that brought together, for a day or two, student representatives from all the different campuses to learn about how to be a representative, to talk to the people in governance and in management and whatever other parts of the university, to generally thresh out their problems and discuss the challenges of being representatives. That worked so well that they’ ve carried that on after she left the university. Australian universities have many challenges because of their really diverse nature. To me, those challenges aren’ t so overwhelming that it shouldn’ t be done.
Would you say we’ re lagging behind other comparable countries? We’ re definitely lagging behind the UK and some countries of Europe. I’ ve looked at Belgium as being an example of a country that has a strong student voice in their university decision-making. [ This is ] an idea that’ s time has come. It’ s a mission for me and I’ m very passionate about it.
At my university we were talking about introducing course representatives widely across the whole institution, but also I went to a meeting where our deputy vice-chancellor( students) talked about having a student advisory group which is from all different areas of the university, which is another interesting move. In Australian universities at the moment we tend to have large numbers of students, varying numbers of students on governance bodies, on academic boards, on faculty boards, on different committees and whatever. They don’ t have a huge amount of training or support – they’ re just kind of there as a box-ticking exercise.
Then quite often universities come up with ideas for strategy or for change outside these kind of committees or boards or whatever. They might consult with students but [ often that happens when the decisions have been pretty much made ]. So they’ ve had consultants look at all the permutations, ramifications, costing of the moves that they’ re going to put into place, and management has been talking about it for a while, and only then are the academics and students asked their view. To me, that’ s not really a consultation because it’ s not involving them from the beginning of the exercise. From the point of view of asking what is the purpose of this strategy that we’ re thinking of and saying let’ s work through it together from the beginning so that everybody involved, everybody who’ s going to be impacted by this move has a say which comes from knowledge, [ rather than ] being presented with a whole lot of stuff at the end and being asked what you think of it.
Would you say it’ s about bringing universities back to their democratic roots? I would – universities as communities of scholars. [ There is so much focus on the corporatisation, marketisation, commodification of education and what universities have had to be in terms of being entrepreneurs and, of course, huge export earners with international education. But all of that aside, what it essentially comes down to is that to be successful you have to engage your – and I hate these terms – client or customer, and your customer growth.
We’ re all about student-centred learning now, so actually the next step is just really involving students in how the university actually works.
One group that certainly makes the most money for universities is international students. How would you rate their involvement in decision-making? They’ re a big group but they’ re a really under-represented group in university decision-making. How many universities actually have specific international student representation on their boards and committees and whatever? Not many I suspect, and it’ s the same with Indigenous students as well, which of course is a much smaller group but hopefully increasing.
International students is a really big area to be looking at, and we used to have this idea that international students just came to be passive in the classroom really. I remember going to a seminar once years and years ago and talked about the‘ ant culture’ and the‘ bee culture’. Westerners were the bee culture who were used to being engaged and asking questions and whatever, whereas the ant culture was used to just sitting and having the information imparted to them and the teacher was [ seen as a ] god.
We still kind of have that view a little bit but that’ s not right anymore, because international students are being a part of a system now which is global. The students who are coming from [ overseas ] generally have [ an understanding of ] the ideas of our education system and the strengths of our education systems. They have lecturers, they have academics teaching them in their own countries before they come here. They have their school systems all changing, so it’ s all changing to be much more active than passive. ■
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