 presentation around that was great. So, academics aversion, this is a really big interest area for me at the moment, sorry I'm just trying to chat and things in the way, because I'm talking to a lot of different staff from across our university about different big ideas that sort of challenge sort of that reserved quiet academic lens and I think you know the relationship between students and staff here is really interesting so I'll get into that in a second. Money, Nina, Ghana, Yata, Ana. I'd like to acknowledge that I'm presenting today from the lands of the Ghana people of the Adelaide Plains. I acknowledge those who walked before elders past and present. The lasting educational spirit of this place remains strong and significant to live in Ghana today. So I hope to continue sharing knowledge and acting with respect in the spirit of reconciliation. Australia always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I think there's some really interesting and important perspectives that Aboriginal cultures bring to the way that we do knowledge sharing as well that I think hopefully play out across this conversation today. So I like this. I've been using this quote quite a bit in workshops and conversations with people which says you're in the process of being indoctrinated. Essentially higher education itself has always been a tool since it's sort of European origin has always been this tool of reproduction of contemporary culture in a sense and it's been more and less elitist over time but there's been a more diverse, massified and open look at the way that we think about and challenge educational practices in recent times which I think is a really positive turn but we're also dealing with a lot more top-down pressures that have conditioned the way that we think and work and so this quote to me in spite of it being quite long is a really interesting and significant thing to think about because once you become aware that your education is just the best of what we know right now from a particular worldview and it might be privileging and exclusive to particular ways of thinking and to particular people as well we can start to have a more critical lens about what we're immersed in and what we're immersed in is and I don't really want to just be really sad for this whole presentation but what we're immersed in is quite dire, precarious and problematic where you know higher education system which I would argue and others have argued is losing its purpose even if we only conceptualize that purpose as a tool of societal reproduction for that dominant culture and so I think we really need to think about well how do we challenge the essence of what this higher education is and what it's for and so in that vein of you know as we heard this morning active student participation how do we actually create an educational experience for students that's more inclusive that's more open and actually equip students not just as job ready graduates but as active citizens that can have an ongoing impact in the world around them continuing in the theme of being sad so we've had you know a litany of cuts restructures funding changes and this slow installation of middle management class in higher education institutions that's destabilized quite narcissistic and very interested in their own sort of self promotion and the status quo effectively so between this this middle management now and then senior executive we've got fewer and fewer people in positions to make decisions that are allies to causes like enhanced democracy challenging global the global status quo and really looking at those big issues beyond you know just is the student going to get a job did they meet that outcome and do they know that particular thing and so in my conversations with staff this this often comes up students aren't even getting out of bed to come to class and I think it's really interesting that academics in contemporary higher education are reproducing these narratives which effectively condition students as lazy not interested and you know not not caring or engaging with their education it's like why are you not reflecting on what you're delivering in your curriculum and how how university is working for those students if they're not bothering to come to your classes it's maybe there's actually something that you could take away from that I think it's something we don't do enough of is sort of wake up to this idea that you know it's not just what we deliver to students it's actually it's got to be a conversation it's got to be more than that and so you know working towards that idea of student agency so I want to rewind a little bit and throw a little bit of Marxian theory at you for a second so Antonio Gramsci who was a Italian scholar and theorist who worked in the early so 19 or 1890 to 1925 or so who was imprisoned for most of his life and wrote a lot of his work basically on scraps of paper and then smuggled them out of a prison window you know fascist regime in Italy but he talked about how society was structured and I think it provides a really useful a useful lens to look at the way that we have cultural reproduction in higher education systems so he basically said let's throw out this sort of lower class working class middle class and upper class idea and let's just have people that have the power to make decisions about society so basically you can think of that as the contemporary one percent people who have the power to govern or manage which includes people like our vice chancellors but also includes you know big big structures and increasingly private companies so CEOs and things like that that have a lot of say in the way that the world is is running but don't necessarily need to sort of take a lot from civil society and civil society is everybody else so everybody's not in that one percent bracket people who basically must work in order to live their life and so this stratification I think is really helpful because when we think about the relationship then to education we can start to see that you know when decisions are being made they're not often except in you know perhaps examples like grants and others from this conference you know they're not necessarily being made in consultation and collaboration and that's really problematic and so over time that political society that sort of dominant group that makes a lot of those decisions have really worked to reinforce that their position in society is a rightful position that the way that we do things is correct and we can see this across all kinds of different narratives from you know colonialism through all kinds of systems of control and structure that that set society up the way that it is and one of those of course is education systems but I think one of the newer emergencies in this space has been this deputization so those in positions at the sort of the top of a pyramid so to speak are starting to deputize those below them as long as they're playing along with the rules and so we're seeing basically less and less agency being permitted in institutions be that an education institution be a government or a private company because the the hierarchy effectively is is following this sort of same set of rules but and to get a little bit more hopeful what's reproduced isn't fixed and we've seen really big you know over the last hundred years we've seen really big changes in massive societal transformations so things like dismantling segregation women's right to vote LGBTQI recognition and so on there's some really big momentous things that have happened you know across lifetimes but and certainly not easily won but major cultural changes which have also rippled into education and we sort of are only starting to grapple with some of these now which kind of shows how long it can take for our institutions to catch up with what's happening in popular culture and I think that's a really interesting thing to think about as well because if we think about these higher education institutions as these these sort of fixed structures and very slow moving beasts we can often be reproducing things that are quite harmful and damaging to you know our student cohort and interestingly in that sense higher education is quite good application so you know somebody who has a problem the institution can sort of hush hush that one particular instance because actually on mass it's mostly people who are relatively privileged who have access to higher education institutions though if we think about it historically the 1960s and 70s sort of big massification of higher education in Australia and rather than just being about educating lawyers doctors and so on the system became more diverse and more open but at the same time we saw big activist booms of you know students protesting you know wars and all kinds of things that were going on around the world and so there was this almost panic from higher education institutions around this emergence of activism they they thought that this was a really bad thing not a really good thing to show that their education was working and having broad societal change but rather than and fortunately it was a Labor government so I'm rather than revert back to this model of exclusivity or scarcity the government decided with good intentions but to tie higher education to employment and in that way preventing the the institution sort of being shut down and segregated back to this really small narrow percentage of people who were then enabled to go on to you know really specific roles it's remained you know diverse but we kind of lost that activist pathway except for those students who were sort of identified as transitioning into politics so sort of emergencies of allyship between the national union of students for example and the factions of the Labor Party as almost a channel for students to move straight from a student politics position into a political position in you know state or federal government and then over the sort of the late 90s early 2000s we saw this application of student bodies with more menial decisions thrown at them to sort of you know make them feel like they were making decisions but actually taking away a lot of that power that they had previously and then threatening academics that sided with students to sort of keep that in fight between students and staff going rather than having an allyship and a partnership between students and staff which obviously was slightly problematic um so this quote this is a quote from a Vice Chancellor at a university that I attended as a student he said to me you're not thinking you're just being radical when we were talking about um cuts and transformations to the university but I actually think that there is a real lesson here for radicalism as a tool for education progressive education such that we could leverage as Levisa talked about this morning we could actually leverage educational um patterns and pedagogies such that we could democratize this idea of radicalism so that we can actually empower students to do a lot more but there are a lot of barriers to that taking place and I also just want to challenge on that I want to challenge this idea that higher education creates knowledge because actually when we think about coming back to Gramsci's lesson actually higher education reproduces knowledges that exist in civil society um and we don't create knowledges we research what's out there through a lens of you know we're going to create novel contributions to the field but actually we're researching things that are already taking place and so I think we've got a lot a long way to go when we think about you know production of knowledge and for a lot of this it's all in who's telling the story so Brie Lee has a fabulous book about who gets to be smart um and I'm going to focus on the second quote here she says that people think history is carved on a tablet but it's more akin to chalk on a blackboard depending on who is standing at the front of the room the lines can be rewritten or even erased altogether and I think that this is really powerful it's a really powerful provocation both for staff and for students because actually if we enable students to be the ones that are standing at the front of the room that are bringing in their perspectives their lived experience we can be more contemporary in our learning and teaching processes and we can address the issues that are of fundamental importance to students which creates a stronger conduit for them to actually bring in things that matter to them so rather than oh my students won't even get out of bed to come to the tutorial it's students are anticipating getting out of bed to come to the tutorial because I get to discuss things that are of real importance to me and then it's the academics job to work out well how has that actually achieved educational values so it's a flipping of the narrative around you know knowledge producers those that have the power to convey information and so on so really sort of challenging our sort of status quo again it's also any bit radical perhaps and I think it's it's easy to sort of talk about this in a positive and hopeful light of you know all that takes is you know let students have a voice let them bring in what they think but actually we're in a system where these things these major sort of themes really are playing out quite strongly and really disempowering students and staff and we're seeing now I think particularly in South Australian higher education that education is no longer working as a tool for the transformation of society but rather is just producing job-ready graduates and so from this frame I'm really challenged to think of well where's the possible where is the more liberatory whereas the more open practices that create human flourishing you know we've got all of these things about individualism all this all this sort of ontological capitalism as I like to refer to it that you know it makes us think about measurable quantity reproduction of the same same old system but we're not having that opportunity to be hopeful and to really challenge the way that we think about education systems and I would really like to see more of that so which just you know really positive and happy conversation that I'm having with you today so voluntary student unionism thank you Liberal government saw students losing access to those collective action systems it was a real real lot loss of massive progress that had been made across the 60s 70s and 80s but two students' credit they rose again and they continue to rise again and again in new forms of activism that we haven't even thought of yet like they're coming up with all these subversive ways of working you know you know closures they're not coming to class but they're still passing their courses it's amazing so you know the ways that students work and think has really changed and the activism now is not the picket protest of 15 years ago but we're also seeing things that attempt to placate those kinds of new forms of subversive activism and I think that's where we need to start to think about ways that we engage students that are more meaningful and more radical and different so where does this leave us really and the things like you know we want to increase the student voice actually help us move forward or are they empty words that's a provocation for you to think about I don't have answers to that but I think you know to me a lot of the practices that we do have in higher education often are empty language can we actually harness those to create social change or to empower students to create social change or not and then you know where do we go from here also wanted to touch on onlineification so this you know the movement you know during obviously during COVID to mass online education I think there's a lot of dominant narratives in this space about how it's made students more lazy they don't learn as much they're not as interested there's not as much interaction and actually I think again we need to challenge our thinking on this because online education is not going away it's been here for 20 years and it's it's not going anywhere and so how do we think about building communities of students that can address those big global challenges that can be more activist how do we actually harness some online education to do that I think that's a really important area for our future so amidst you know onlineification but also amidst all these other narratives of you know students don't do the work they don't shop to class my students are always cheating they plagiarise from one another they're lazy oh they're all really disengaged you know there is these really pervasive narratives that frame the way that we think about students and if we take these on as staff and if students take them on themselves we do see a complete disengagement and I think that that's something that we really need to challenge and think about because actually when we think about again the provocation from this morning's keynote and when we think about the student panel from yesterday there are so many lessons in you know coming together for a decolonised anti-racist anti-sexist anti-abolist system of education that uses education as a vehicle for addressing grand global challenges that's the thing that unifies us that's the power and it's like the educational outcomes from that are almost a side benefit because if we can come together and collectively challenge the status quo the things that aren't working for us but also move to address these huge societal inequities massive environmental challenges all of those kinds of things that's where we can use education as a real tool for making some kind of social impact and we can't afford to wait because these things are happening around us right now it's it's you know it's everywhere all right so I'm very sorry for my very cheerful presentation but I think in fact this idea of harnessing an astridicore of the aspirant middle-class university narcissist could actually give us one vehicle towards creating meaningful change so when you see empty empty buzzwords figure out ways of of being subversive and actioning things underneath these new narratives so I think you know for our our institutions at UniSA one of the big things that we're working towards at the moment is authentic assessment you know which again empty buzzword but one of the things that I've sought to do with colleagues is to bring in a student partnership perspective so that students can negotiate what authentic looks like to them in their context so it's about finding ways to enact decolonized equity first egalitarian open and activist education through these narratives that are introduced about students about staff and about the way that we come together and I think it's on all of us be that student or staff to work together to really challenge the way that we think about higher education how we think about the values that we discuss and to actually move education back or maybe for the first time into a space that creates liberatory practice that's shared between people and to take the tools of that education back out to the community and diversify not an individualistic equipping single students with the capacity to be you know politically active but actually equipping students to be teachers to take their knowledge back to their community and share their learning with their peers and to create something better together so that's my that's my provocation for you and I'm sorry that it was a bit you know a little bit negative but you know hopefully that's got you thinking I'm really happy to take any questions or discussion thanks so much Aiden um I didn't think it was depressing I thought that it was empowering um does anyone have any questions for Aiden? Manaya um I agree with Piper there I thought uh very um provoking questions that are much needed and also in the networks that I've been involved in along the same lines I consider them facts it's the reality of what is happening right now within um both uh higher ed and the area that we speak a lot about is within the secondary school sector where they are transitioning into higher education and the same issues um or challenges are present there so what I the question that I wanted to ask was basically a lot of the discussions we also have is how student voice um can impact the curriculum and I wondered if that was something that you had any thoughts on or whether you would like to share anything along those lines because we felt that that was a really huge um challenge and education being key that is something you know of course across the board yeah absolutely and it is it is a challenge particularly when we've got you know compliance mechanisms and other sort of policy tools that say you know the curriculum shall be this and it will work in this way um but I think you know the thing for me has been starting small so you know a number of course coordinators that I'm working with um have begun to do things like negotiate assessment like a really basic entry level thing um but just making small steps towards changing areas of curriculum such that students can bring their perspectives in and I think in the grander scheme of things to start to move towards a system where um right from sort of first year there's a there's quite a bit of structure there but students are invited to bring their lived experience they're able to negotiate um you know the things that they are interested in and that they can start to have an impact and then you know build that across a you know a degree such that by the you know third year fourth year level students are effectively responsible for curriculum um I don't have an answer to how that looks in policy but I think it's incredibly possible and I think that you know it's somewhere where the sector is moving and it has been done you know as we heard from Makino this morning it's been done in places like Sweden so um yeah I think that's that's where we're heading it just it is a it's a challenging road and I think start small and chip away cool thank you for that thank you Kate do you have a question yes hello thanks Aiden I've worked with you you're much more positive than perhaps you worry about not being that makes sense um but like I agree I think these are kind of given but um yeah difficult just incredibly difficult challenges in our institutions um and I think there are a lot of competing interests that kind of get in the way it's really hard to kind of talk about this agenda of um transformation and civics and citizenship and tackling these big issues out there in the world a way like that are very much actually not out there they're very much in here as well in our institutions um when we're worried about like job ready graduates and student satisfaction ratings and rankings and all of that kind of thing so it is hard um my question or sort of something I was thinking about when you're talking was probably what Manaya was saying reflecting on school um schools um I feel like I'm sort of wondering about how much do our universities like do we have to worry about this or is there room to be hopeful in the way in which schools now maybe tackle some of their student voice work um and their focus more on civics and citizenship and we see that the school sort of protests around climate action and all of that stuff that's going on there that seems to fit a little bit more comfortably or there's space for that because they're seen as sort of probably like controllable but you know all that good on them like harnessing their youthful energy um why does that suddenly just disappear when we reach university um and do you actually see there's a difference yeah I think well that's that's a really good question Kate um it look I I don't know what it is that universities are doing that switches those students off or just doesn't like just doesn't sort of let them in like there's not a bridge there um and I you know I suspect it's sort of happening in pockets but it's something that I think you know we're having a lot of issues sector-wide at the moment um you know across all higher education with that an initial attraction rate um and actually getting students in and I think that's maybe part of the problem is that we're not connecting with those students who give a shit frankly you know it's like we're not um lining up I don't know our marketing but also our practice with the way that you know with the things that students care about and I think that's part of the reason why we've seen that you know that narrative of disengagement come up a lot more um and so yeah I and I don't I don't know what the answer to that is other than you know how do we make a higher education system more responsive to actually the big challenges and the current social issues because otherwise we're just going to fade into a relevance yeah there seems to just be a different focus when suddenly you get to university and yeah of course there's differences there's the competition of the market there's a mark universities exist in more of a marketplace although schools do too for sure but I'm aware of something if anyone's interested the Victorian student representative council um is this as an src for all Victorian school students and I was involved way back in the beginning of that and it's just gone from strength to strength working particularly with the Victorian state government um they do incredible work and it doesn't seem to be anywhere in which those students can't get involved and I think this is secondary school students this happens in primary schools like people can make space for it if they want to and so we can do that in our institutions too I really believe that thank you so much Aidan thank you