Good afternoon everyone. It's a, it's a thirsty afternoon, so I apologize for that. Well, I hope you, my name is Vajihayisha. I work at the Arts Teaching Innovation at the University of Melbourne. I hope you're not all too feeling down by our another yet another phase of lockdown. I think by now we're used to it and we, if the lockdown is about to happen, I think most of us are like, they should make it do right now so that we don't have to go into a longer lockdown. Anyway, so be here. Be heard is our student voice and student representation project that we've been working on since 2018. And what we've done with this presentation is that we, we kind of make it into, made it into a panel discussion. So I'll ask questions and Neera and Cable are going to reply to that. But before that, I'll ask Neera and Campbell to just introduce themselves. All right, this is Neera and I'm a colleague of Vajihay, Vajihay and I actually have been running this project together ever since and we are part of Arts Teaching Innovation team of University of Melbourne. And Campbell is our lovely student. Campbell, if you say this. Yeah, I'm, I'm a, I've recently finished my Honours Degree at University of Melbourne in Philosophy, still, still involved in Be Here Be Heard and been a member of the team coming up to about two years now. Wow, two years. So Neera, why don't you start by telling us what Be Here Be Heard is? As you mentioned, the Be Here Be Heard is a student voice project. The central objective of Be Here Be Heard is to initiate, initiate student voice and enable student agency in their arts journey. In its current form, it's a student led project which promotes student voice as an agency to bring positive changes, developments, inclusions and advancements in arts teaching and learning. And this particular project actually acknowledges students as co-creators of their educational experience. And this recognizes that students' engagement sits within a broader transformative learning, teaching and learning pedagogies, which are very sort of central theme of higher education these days. Before I move forward, could I ask all the participants to please mute your, your videos so I can hear a bit of noise in their background? Thank you very much. Now, Campbell, as a student, how has your representation and participation in this program been throughout these two years that you've been a part of it? Yeah, I mean, I've really been impressed by it. I've been involved in student leadership sort of initiatives before, you know, in high school and elsewhere at university. But really what distinguishes Be Here Be Heard is this, it takes seriously its mission of being led by students. Nira isn't the leader of the team. She's the facilitator. She's our sort of conduit to the faculty. But what Be Here Be Heard does over the course of the year is determined by students on the team based on things students have said in the programs, the consultations run by Be Here Be Heard. So it's very much a student-led program. It takes that really seriously. And it's not just about consultation and having our voices heard. It's very much about being able to make decisions, deliver programs and sort of represent students on behalf of the student body right up to the level of the faculty board. So it's a really fantastic mode of representation and it sort of fosters this kind of collegial sense of community between staff, students and faculty, academics like Nira who were involved in it and others on the arts teaching innovation team who were involved in it. As an arts student, you get a really great sense of what the arts faculty is about, who else is involved and how it is this sort of interdisciplinary kind of field and what sort of work goes on behind the scenes and you kind of get your foot in the door as a student into what other things are possible. So you get a really holistic kind of experience as a member of the team but it also gives you a really holistic view of what the faculty of arts is and what its role is in the university. So it's a really, really wide reaching sort of quite truly student-led mode of partnership and co-design. Nira, where does this project sit within the faculty parts? As I mentioned at the beginning that be here be hard as a project it acknowledges students as co-creator and the transformative learning pedagogy is one of the central things we take within our faculty of arts. This project is an initiative, initial initiative of the co-creation and co-creation agency and within this project we actually see our students as Campbell was talking about that how it is different from other student representation and it's just not one way data collection thing. So we actually see the students as a consultant at the beginning and then gradually they can get more involved as sort of representative co-researcher, co-designer and this is the diagram what you have and I prepared just to and we adopted it from Boville and others just to sort of describe to our colleagues and you all that how we actually include and involve our students in terms of ensuring the engagement, their participation, their collaboration and cooperation in this co-creation activity and this project is a very much part of that co-creation activity so it's not just hearing the students and all right okay we hear you and then we'll see what we can do it's we are actually taking students on board as co-creator, as co-designer, as consultant, as co-researcher to see what changes, positive changes and developments, inclusions we can bring within our teaching and learning practices. So kind of I would like to add to that point is that the strength of this project is not just hearing and listening to student voice but also kind of implementing those strategies and those recommendations that are coming directly from them. So the way we normally work is from the first very first focus group that we conducted with students that was three years ago we can see those changes now being implemented in the curriculum design so Nira and I were both educational designers with different titles within the arts teaching innovation and this connection with students allows us directly to make changes on a subject level, on an assignment level, on a program level and we also are involved in developing conducting professional development for academics arts academics as well. So it's kind of three tiered approach that we have where we are getting feedback and insights from students and then working hard to make sure that it goes back to academics that are involved within at different level and the faculty has been very sort of proactive in this space as well so now this project has evolved into co-creating further so we're talking about including students in governance, proper executive governance so that's the extent of the impact this project has had. I'll just add to what you said was here in terms of that you know yes in terms of co-creation subject engagement and you know the collaboration cooperation in terms of teaching and learning but this project also is impacting in a way that it's creating the sense of belonging within the community so and that sense of belonging is not just for us as staff members but also from the students and you know creating the sense of arts identity and taking arts or you know the humanities and arts pride you know and that is very much central to the discussion it is making within the community. So maybe Nia you can talk a little bit about our roles within this project. As Wajie and I always make jokes with our colleagues that we are kind of bridge. Wajie and I make a bridge between you know the student and the staff members so we are actually the facilitators of this project while Campbell and students like him are the you know the voice of this project so Wajie and I organize the facilitation of the student voice and activation of the student agency. We work as a sort of conduit between three stakeholders primarily one is academics students and professional staff but last year Wajie what we started doing that Wajie and I started also with our student team we started talking to the alumni as well so we are kind of extending that stakeholder to do even to the alumni and then one of our major roles is develop and deliver a safe space for the students to talk about very freely that what they think about the way teaching and learning is being done how it can be improved and what are the things they want to see as the part of the academic community and this is something I'm sure Wajie will agree with me this is something we really take pride of that how students feel free to come to us and talk to us and sometimes we become their confident in terms of the way they communicate with us and talk to us and they you know in last three years we could see the changes happening in such way that students can feel though it might be slow change but you know they can share with us their ideas and we can take it to the next level so that is something we are doing as academics within the faculty what would you talk about the role that students play within this project practically on a day-to-day basis yeah so there are there are a variety of roles depending on your your sort of level of engagement and involvement would be here be heard at the simplest level you can be a effectively a student consultant who comes along to the events we run so which we'll talk about in the moment but focus groups the pop-up cafe initiative and our annual symposium if you come along to that you're serving as a consultant you're in workshops you're in discussion with members of the team or members of the arts teaching innovation team and having your voice heard that way but there are other sort of ways of getting more more integrated as you become a more active sort of member of the be here be heard team and that's where you're actively workshopping and collaborating with academics you're speaking with other members of the faculty staff academics and students alike in different fields and you're being being involved in the process of developing and delivering the the sort of consultation programs and workshops as well so you are sort of on the other side of the fence as a facilitator as much as as a consultant at that level then finally you you might be someone who is quite quite prominent in and quite active in in be here be heard once you've been working with it for a while and you will be delivering new projects designing new projects you will be actively reporting on student voice over the course of that year to the faculty board so I was lucky enough to do that at the end of last year report on our findings from 2020 which was a very quite significant thing quite a significant year and so that that was great I went for someone who at the very start was just attended a basically a workshop to someone who was able to really speak on behalf of students to directly to the dean of arts and everyone in the arts faculty has that opportunity to be involved and be here be heard we we don't selectively recruit anyone who wants to be involved can get involved in some capacity or another and we'll kind of there's pathways for them to be involved in all sorts of ways in increasing levels of complexity another sort of way that that we're involved not just as collaborators in terms of consultation but where we're also doing a lot of writing even behind the scenes sort of putting together reports of the data that we've collected to deliver the faculty or back to students to report on what we've been doing all sorts of things at that level that again is is done by us we work quite autonomously a lot of the time particularly during 2020 during the online period couple of other students members of the team and I were running projects without really even consulting nearer we would just go off and do it ourselves and run it ourselves so at that level it very much is this autonomous kind of student student entity that is co-designing and partnering so there's different levels and different roles at different levels of complexity and involvement and they roughly tend to correspond to how long you've been involved in the project you kind of move through the different roles so that's how that's how it works. So Anira most of the stuff that Campbell has done has been online because he joined us in around 20 yeah end of 2019 so how was your experience in transitioning this project to online how did it work? Like anyone else in this room I will say last year hasn't been easy it was a challenging year and Wojah and I needed to really really work closely with our student team to find out the innovative ways to connect with more students and provided them a safe space as that is something we wanted to always do and last year particularly it as it was a very challenging year we needed to make sure that students have voice when the campus was not you know available for them and it's everything was online so there was no kind of sense of community or sense of the campus and friends and things like that so this is something we closely worked with the student team in terms of how we can continue the dialogue and you know the conversation throughout the year we even had to move our annual symposium online and Campbell might focus more on that what are the steps we took last year in particular you know what are the actions we took last year in terms of facilitating the student voice and agency Campbell? Yeah so last year it was a difficult transition to moving online partly because some of our initiatives had not even been running offline and we already had to kind of rejig them to run online so we're running focus groups near was very much leading that where the idea was to have a quite free flowing discussion with students to hear their thoughts but focused around a theme so online teaching and learning for much of last year was a really prominent team there. One of our sort of flagship programs last year was the pop-up cafe that was named that way because initially it was going to be a live on campus thing where we had tea and coffee set up for students to come and sit down and have a chat with the team and share their thoughts on whatever topics but we had to sort of migrate across to Zoom so that substantially changed how the program was structured but the spirit of it was the same which is that we would have a session open for a certain period or a certain time students could drop in at any time leave at any time and discuss whatever they like so rather than being structured around a theme students were invited to share their thoughts on anything no matter how minor no matter how specific to their personal experiences what we wanted was to get them to share the things that they might otherwise not have an opportunity to things that slip under the radar because maybe students feel that they're they're they're being petty if they if they complain about this idea they maybe feel that it's an issue that's so specific to their circumstances that it isn't worth sort of making a statement about we wanted students to come in and share whatever they liked no matter how small or how specific so that was that was the idea behind that and in that discussion which was facilitated by members of the team so rather than have a one person leading the discussion and different people sort of chiming in it was a free flowing discussion between students who are members of the team and students who had just sort of come for this event and that was a really great way to collect some some really interesting perspectives on arts experience in general but also on the quite specific circumstances of last year in learning online so that was a really really important initiative and our findings from that kind of informed how we structured the our annual event which is the reshaping art symposium which we've had in person once and last year it was online that's an initiative where we bring members of academic staff support staff members of the board as well as students from all year levels graduate and undergraduate to this two-day conference event where there are workshops on particular themes and issues that are just as much about oriented towards solutions as well as generating and identifying problems and then there are panel discussions in Plenary where the whole arts community comes together to have their voices heard to share their perspectives and sort of come up with solutions together so that was a really important event in the combination of really the entire project for that year and the findings from that were then presented to the faculty board a couple months later. And Campbell may very quickly maybe you could talk a little bit about the interactive publication as well. Yeah so there's too much more to say about this this is one this is one aspect of what we do as a means of communicating our findings and the project to other students as well as to just academics you might not be aware of what Be Here Be Heard does. It's an interactive digital publication so part of what we really like about that is it allows us to write articles about what Be Here Be Heard has done and students write those articles of course but we can also integrate and you can see here in the image we integrate voice clips from voice recordings of things students have said over the course of the year so you can listen to those those student quotes and there are some really fabulous insights there really interesting things students have said and you can it sounds a bit cheesy but we really like the idea that you can literally hear the student voices through this publication so that's something that we will be doing every year it's designed and written by students and it's sort of our means of communicating to the faculty what we've been doing and showcasing that. Anira just to wrap up what is where to next and as Campbell mentioned that every year when we do the annual symposium we kind of talk about what we have discussed so far within that year and that actually leads us you know to the kind of vision for the following year and so in 2021 we'll be still talking about online teaching and learning because it is still happening very much real and many of our students are offshore still and many of our subjects are sort of taught online so that's there arts identity is one of the things and inclusive arts community and particularly last year has taught us that how the sense of community or sense of belonging is so important and particularly arts being such a huge faculty that sense of community is so important at the same time the arts identity is very important because in the social kind of psyche arts degree might not be as valuable as you know the other professional degree whereas the statistics is saying something different but our politicians sometimes don't and the policymakers don't really always agree with us though most of them are art students. All right so we want to say that how that is sort of growing that arts identity is really crucial and as I mentioned that working with the alumni the industry and our academics are part of that so that's kind of what we are working towards this year listening to the students we are still running the pop-up cafe virtually and the focus groups are running and we are planning towards our October symposium this year as well. Yeah we we so we got a little bit of grant to actually connect our local students with international students and it's a it's a grant that's going to fund a project where students will develop videos here and overseas and we'll just have a workplace platform where they will invite people and have a space for them within a classroom or tell them how the campus looks like which won't happen within this lockdown period but hopefully will happen in the months and the weeks to come. I just just wanted to say that this has been a sheer privilege to work with students and develop this project but also we would be very very much interested in connecting with anybody who wants to connect with us and have cross cross faculty cross institute collaboration or meetings or presentations we were very much we're very much looking forward to contact people who actually are doing and working within this field to understand how to better improve our project but also to contribute better to this whole field of student partnership and student voice thank you very much. And and Bojiya just to answer Kat's question it's a wonderful question Kat you put in the chat box that you know the what reward and recognition do you offer students involved in Bihar Bihar and as Campbell and we tried to explain that students actually get involved in various different ways so you know it and the recognitions are also various different level so some sometimes students can get the scope to do work as an intern for this project and that goes to their internship subject so that internship is organized and the students who really work as the researcher and core researcher and co-designer of the thing so our core team so every year 10 to 12 students they really work at that level they actually get the dean's recognition certificate from the faculty and they get the referral letter from the associate dean as well and so the recognitions are of various levels and ways we try to recognition but we are very mindful of in terms of you know the vouchers and you know the payment issues because we needed to make it very sort of what should I say Bojiya that it's egalitarian and make sort of everyone gets some scopes and you know it's a it's a voluntary sort of participation but we recognize their participation and one of the other things Bojiya and I started doing it from particularly from 2020 if I'm wrong Bojiya correct me that it's a part of the collegial process as well so we actually take our students like Campbell last year we took other students to different conferences to present with us to talk to you know the different academic community and the interactive publication Campbell mentioned that is also part of recognition because students are the writers there and they are writing co-writing with us and you know they are code editor of that and so you know getting their names printed and publishing as a student writer this is something we recognize as recognition did I miss anything Bojiya no you didn't but also Sonia asked if this idea has been spread to other faculties yes it has actually it's been taken up by the university by the university executives and we have this project called student it's a student student life project and other faculties are taking this kind of student weight and student partnership approach towards their student life project as well so yeah it's gonna it's it's really is expanding yeah pretty cool and last year we are all right Nira we have to all right we have to kind of kind of consider because as we have to go back to the conversation but please contact us yeah


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