 Hi everybody, my name is Johanna Funk and I'm Janice Krider and today we're going to be presenting our pre-recorded session about how we're refreshing the narrative open educational practice in STEM pedagogy for primary teachers. So I'll just start sharing our presentation. So we're from the College of Indigenous Futures Education and Arts at Charles Darwin University in Northern Australia. And our theme for this presentation for the conference is open in action. We want to first acknowledge that we are sitting on Larakia country in the far north of what's known as Australia. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet and work and pay our respects to elders past and present. And of course extend that respect to any first peoples joining us today. We're especially grateful to be able to engage with some of the knowledge that's been shared with us to continue growing equitable learning in our roles here at the university. So from my perspective, I've been part of the open education research community for eight years now. And I've always enjoyed that democratization access to education and learning and the ability to open up the representation of learning and knowledge to different communities of students and learners and knowledge holders. And it struck me as we were developing this research project that we're doing on this unit that the four discrete disciplinary areas of STEM is a very much a privileged field. And so I'm starting to see a shift from the learning resource that used to be static and expensive and only accessible to certain groups of people. To now adaptable and democratized and accessible to participation from lots of different groups of people. So the way that we're talking about stem now in this presentation and in this unit for primary school teachers is including their ownership of their learning and how stem is present in culturally diverse and socially diverse context that we live in. Thanks to Hannah and I'll just add my background has been predominantly in science education and STEM education and working as a scientist in the field. My main area of research has been STEM and science and science related professions or workplaces and gender. So when it comes to democratizing the the field of STEM and science, it's a key interest to me. My predominantly my work experience as a scientist has been working with Indigenous communities. And that certainly opened my eyes to different understandings of STEM. I completed a science degree in natural resource management and GIS remote sensing, and then almost immediately went to work in Arnhem Land in Australia in a role actually looking at working with local Indigenous Rangers to develop a database that could integrate Aboriginal understandings and knowledge of natural resource management with Western concepts. From that experience, I realized how close STEM in the Western world tends to be or how close science perceptions tend to be. And so now I definitely work to democratize and be inclusive of all types of knowledge in STEM and different practices. As well as a large number of First Nations students at the university, we're both working in teacher education. And so when we're working with our students who are pre-service teachers, we are aware that the context that they're going to be teaching in as primary school teachers is very much in that Australian context where they'll be teaching on First Nations traditional land. Now particularly for students across the top end of Australia, most of the students in their primary school classrooms will be Indigenous students. They'll be First Nations students who will, depending on their family and cultural experiences, have different levels of knowledge and understanding of both Western and First Nations STEM knowledges. So another really great aspect of this unit is the redesign story and how Janice and I got to develop our co-teaching approach and the way we model collegial feedback and discussion. And so we got really excited and I reached out to all my contacts and found a bunch of different ways that we could use case studies and guest lectures. And so moving from the top there is a fire map that is in collaboration with the North Australian Fire Information Service, but also a lot of links to Indigenous Ranger groups that work in collaboration with fire. And then there's the engineering of the Indigenous fish traps that has become part of an art form now in galleries. We've got a current exhibit at the Art Gallery here at CDU where we took students in the Zoom session to the gallery and they participated in an excursion with us like that. We of course have a seasonal calendar from Dr. Guthajaka, who is an eminent Yolo scholar with CDU. We've got crocodiles hatching where Janice has done a lot of work with. And so we speak to those experiences of her working with Ranger groups, monitoring with GIS remote sensing, lots of flora and fauna out in the Arnhem Land region. And I of course have a contact who's the field epidemiologist and working for the World Health Organization. So we got to really get a wonderful privileged insight into epidemiology. And the biggest thing that we take home with us is the ability to discuss and engage with the social and artistic humanitarian aspects of these STEM fields. So we're doing a lot of that inquiry based pedagogy that's of course really lends itself to open educational practice. We're developing a press book for the students assignments to be published in and that we can add to with every body, every cohort of students. And we're using a peer feedback tool and discussion boards to really inform how we go about our weekly lectures or workshops. And model those things for the students. So that's my little redesign story. Janice, do you have anything you want to add? One thing that I'm really enjoying about this approach to STEM is that our focus for this part of semester is actually on STEM pedagogy. So we introduce students to STEM pedagogy through stories. And usually every week we start the workshop with Johanna telling a story from usually one of the Indigenous or First Nations STEM case studies. And this tends to open our minds not only from a STEM perspective but from a philosophical perspective. And it's also a major shift in if we go back to trying to make STEM available to everyday. This is a major shift on where STEM usually begins. Usually STEM begins with Western STEM, usually very masculine knowledge systems. Commonly we see STEM studies starting with machines or digital technology. So in this shift we actually go to the land and sitting in Australia on First Nations land is a privilege. So it's actually really good to be able to make that our starting point every week, even if the stories are coming from other places. Through these stories and then through discussion and interrogation of the signs behind them. I think this lends itself to our next slide but people have been commenting, the pre-service teachers have been commenting on how positive this approach is for them. Because they feel as if they become involved in the story and have space to think out and define what's going on. And at first people were saying we're not quite sure what's expected of us. But that seems to have become an advantage rather than a disadvantage in the units because students have become much more relaxed to this idea that they're allowed to ponder and explore. And in actual fact that's something that's integral to the units because we really want to promote inquiry based learning, which needs us to take that exploration and be not afraid to try things. And that's why we've been using feedback tools to try and encourage students to share with each other. And so there's a lot of peer support but also peer tutoring and peer learning going on through that tool. And that's also one thing Johanna and I have been trying to role model in our weekly workshops with the students. Over to you now Johanna. So just to paraphrase this is one very lovely comment that we received today. A student said they love how Janice and Johanna bones off each other to women in science giving examples and positive feedback to one another and how how lovely and refreshing is that in comparison to the you know the dominant kind of work force development industrial link heavy tell you know narrative about stem that you know via this kind of previously and historically really said you know, like you said, white and Eurocentric masculine eyes kind of field. We're actually demonstrating the way stem shows up in the world that we live in and thereby making it more accessible to to students but also to our students future students in primary school classrooms, which is so exciting. Yeah. It's quite I've taught in quite a few schools Johanna and this is. This is a different approach to stem and when it comes to the first nations knowledges. Usually they come in later we talk about stem and then we introduce them as something that's possible. So to reiterate, I'm very much enjoying that the, the starting point here is with first nation stories and knowledge, but also the, the, the opening shared feedback and opportunities that the students have and the fact that their work can actually go into the press book and be shared. I'm feeling more confident like so often in my experience as a teacher in schools and too often, like I say students learn science and maths that is far removed from their daily life. And what I feel we're encouraging through this unit is not only to make the stem field accessible for our pre service teachers but to definitely equip them to go into a classroom. They will encourage students to start engaging with what's happening to them personally and within their community. It makes me realize that we're doing open practices here on with with this discipline area and moving it away from a discrete discipline area into a more socialized understanding so it's been so far it's only halfway through semester and it's a real pleasure. It's just the start of this concept because almost this is like a pilot project and we're looking at developing other related units so that we can have similar outcomes for the future. And hopefully influence how stem and science is taught in terms of gender culture and all the other intersectionalities that exist that act as barriers to stem and science. Beautiful. I think that says it right there. So thank you so much everybody for listening and thank you. We will be answering questions as we go obviously so we'll see you. We'll see you on the day. See you on the day and I'm enjoying how it doesn't put any captions up for me. Obviously the artificial intelligence doesn't isn't advanced enough to to take on certain accents. Clearly. Thank you Johanna. Thank you Janice. Thanks everybody. Thanks bye.