 presentation today from my own perspective only. These are my thoughts, my ideas, I'm not speaking for the disability community and I'm not speaking as a student representative from UniSC either, officially anyway. I'm just here as Bailey today, giving you some insights I guess on things that I found over the last year as a student rep. So I am white presenting, I'm wearing a long sleeve black stripy kind of shirt, I have short hair and having a really bad hair day and I'm wearing headset. So following on from other people today that have spoken about diversity and and whatnot, I feel like I'm following on in that same kind of vein which is pretty awesome, we all seem to be on the same page quite a lot. But before I get onto that, and this is not working for me, hang on a sec. Okay, I would like to do my acknowledgement of country please. I'd like to pay my respects to the gubby gubby gubby gubby people, they're a traditional custodians of the land on which I work, learn and play. I recognise their continuing connection to land, water and country and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. So I want to he's never been seated and this always was and always will be Aboriginal land. So for today's presentation, I'm going to talk about my experience as a student representative, talk about how one voice sometimes isn't enough in this space. Tell you a little bit about the collectivist perspective versus the individualist perspective and how that applies to the disability community. Present two collectivist ideas that I've been having of late. And then I want to discuss a little bit about how we can create that collectivist community by and then finally doing a padlet and hopefully getting some of your ideas as well. So we know that people with disability, they're 18% less likely than the general population to have a bachelor's degree. And let's face it, people with disability are less likely to have favourable outcomes across the board when it comes to education. There was one statistic that defies that, however, in Tasmania retention rates are actually more improved. So whatever Tasmania is doing for retention with students with disability, please keep it up, that's fantastic. But everywhere else outcomes for students with disability are less favourable. So what I'm interested in is how do we fix that? Also, I have a physical disability, so I apologise for being very slow at some points here as well. So my experience as a student with disability representative, I started my bachelor halfway through 2020. For the first four or five weeks, we were online only. And then after that, we started going to class on campus. And I was very nervous as a wheelchair student. I had a wheelchair for 10 years, but due to a lack of funding, I've basically been at home that whole time. And so this was the first time I'd really been out in public as a wheelchair user. And so I started going to class and that was great. One of my classes we had to do group assignment. And my group, fantastic. And the rest of the students in the class were great as well. But that assignment involved presenting an activity to the class that the class participated in. And the very first week, the group that presented did an activity where people had to stand up and then fall to the ground. I don't remember the name of it, I think most of us ended up finding something online to use for these assignments. But whoever won was the person who could do this most dramatically. And so I'm sitting there in my wheelchair thinking, well, I can't participate. And it was really upsetting because you could win chocolate and I'm a very big chocolate fan. So I'm sitting there looking at the students with the activity and it kind of occurred to them, oh crap. Yeah, she can't participate. So they came over to talk to me and said, oh, you can just sit there with your arms crossed instead or put your hands up instead. And I'm thinking, yeah, that's not really how we do inclusivity. And throughout the session, it was my first time, I guess, I got a bit upset. It was obvious I was upset. One of the group members came over, she actually pat me like I was a puppy dog, which was just kind of really weird. And anyway, so that was a really interesting experience. And it comes up in a moment. Not long after that, I became the undergrad student rep for the date, the disability and inclusion action plan for the university. And at the end of the semester, the two staff members working on that plan with me, they weren't available to present it to the Learning and Teaching Committee. So they asked me to do that. And so I did. And after my presentation there, one of the staff members said, why do we need this plan, haven't we already like fixed disability yet? Haven't we solved disability issues? And I couldn't maintain professionalism at all. I burst out laughing, thinking back to this group assignment that I'd had. And I'm thinking of social work students and my tutor, who also had no idea what to do that day in response to what had happened. If they weren't aware of accessibility issues, if they weren't aware of what it was like to be a disabled student, how can we expect anyone else to? So yeah, we kind of still need the plan. There's still a lot of issues. Every week I spend hours fighting for access at my campus. And a lot of the stuff, it's systemic. It's nobody's fault really. I can't blame anybody, but these issues are there. So the year after, beginning of last year, I became the co-chair of School and Law and Society. And that's our student representative group, students as partners that we have at UniSE. And as part of that work that I was doing as a student rep, I came to realise that our Student Senate had groups for various minority groups, such as international students and athletes, but no specific representation for disabled students. And so I founded the Disability and Inclusion Student Group. So we've been running for about 12 months now. It's been slow process. Not long after that, I had a conversation with Kelly Matthews, and she introduced me to Piper at SVA. And we started the Students with Disability Leadership Collective. Again, this has been slow process to get it up and running. But we've started that. We have another couple of meetings later this year. So hopefully from next year, that will be working nicely. Still, a student emailed me last week and said that they dropped out because they haven't been offered support at the university. So we still need to do a lot more in this space. As a student rep for the DAPE when I applied for that, I had to let them know why I wanted the position and why I was a good fit for the position. And so I emailed them my experience. And so that kind of looked a little something like this. And I'm not trying to brag here, why I'm using this as an example will become apparent a little bit later. But I have all of these disabilities, plus many, many more. My primary disability is LSDL syndrome. It creates a lot more disabilities. It's really fun to live with. I also have two children with disabilities. Those are my kids in the corner. I have various advocacy certificates that I've gained over the years. I've been a disability advocate for over 10 years. And so I kind of thought that I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of knowledge. And then I became a student advocate and realized maybe not so much. Maybe lived experience isn't quite enough. So even with all that experience that I have, I can't speak to some areas, such as I can't speak to having an assistance dog. I can't speak to having complete vision or hearing loss. There's a lot of disability areas that I can't personally speak to. And I imagine that's the same for quite a lot of student representatives who have a disability. And sometimes, even within our own disabilities, there was an event a little while ago. And when I arrived, some people had dumped their bags and coffees and whatnot around the accessible part of the lecture theatre and had left. So I had nowhere to park my wheelchair, except for the other side of the lecture theatre which wasn't being used. And so I was separate from everybody. I couldn't see the screen. I couldn't hear properly. And I ended up leaving after about 10 minutes because there was just no point to me being there. That kind of issue had never occurred to me. It had not occurred to me that this might happen. So I didn't have a plan for what to do when it happened. So even within our own disabilities, sometimes accessibility issues can come up that we're not ready for. We can also have within disability representation, sometimes things occur where two different accessibility issues collide. So if you think about volume, for example, sometimes meetings might turn the volume up and it was actually that same day, later on in the day, they said that this guy had turned his microphone up and it was very loud. And he said that he had done that to be accessible for people who may have been hard of hearing. And I looked around the room as an autistic person and I noticed three other autistic people and all of us were kind of cringing because we can't deal with lots of noise. And again, we ended up having to leave. So when those things can collide, sometimes having that one voice, if I had just gone in there as an autistic person and said, okay, this is my experience. This is how it needs to be. That's not enough. We need more than that. No one student can ever know everything there is to know about accessibility. No professional can ever know everything there is to know about accessibility. Disability is very personal and things come up that we can't always know are going to happen. So one of the things that I like to do is ask myself when I'm in a meeting and I'm speaking. I always kind of like to say, hey, am I speaking for myself? Is this just my lived experience? Or have I done the research and am I speaking for the community? And even then only generally, usually. In addition to that, we just need general additional support from our universities. So to look at the collectivist perspective versus the individualist perspective, I started reading about this a few months ago and I thought it was very interesting how with some global north cultures, they tend to have an individualist perspective such as Australia, where individuals may tend to fend for themselves, regardless of their capacity to do so. And collectivist cultures in the global south generally tend to gather around and support those in need. And this is the mass generalization. I've noticed that there seems to be an individualist perspective at higher education institutions where students are expected to speak up on their own behalf and advocate for their own needs. Unfortunately for students with a disability and commonly because of that disability itself, these students cannot advocate for themselves. Many students with disability have come to me over the past 12 months and told me that, you know, the university is not offered XYZ. Obviously feeling as the student I mentioned before did, that the university should be offering support instead of the university's current position, excuse me, of expecting students to not only ask for support but sometimes having to fight for that support. People with disability are a culture and to ourselves, we have our own culture. And within disability culture, there are other cultures such as autistic culture and deaf culture. Despite living in the larger Australian culture where individualism usually rules, within the disability community, we tend to have a more collectivist approach, which is not surprising because the Australian community doesn't tend to include us. So we have to help each other. We have to be helped by our families. Etc. So coming to university can be a culture shock for students with disability. And given that this can be due to the disability itself, it shouldn't be up to the individuals to change, but universities need to change how they deal with and support disabled students and student representatives with a disability. So with that collectivist perspective, how we do that is a complicated question really for minds far greater than my own, but I thought maybe we could start with two points. Universities need to acknowledge as institutions that students with disability may require a different set of rules. So if they could learn about disability culture and adapt practices to suit, don't expect students with disability to come to your world, that offers an adventure and come into our world. Within the student representative spaces, we need to ensure there's a collectivist approach to the work that we do and the systems that we create. So how do we create a collectivist approach? One of the ways that the disability and inclusion student group is doing this is by offering up multiple leadership positions for each of our campuses. Our group will still have two main co-chairs at the present time those are situated at our main campus, but in addition, we're about to have an additional five campus specific leadership roles so that members feel a sense of ownership of the group. Instead of strangers from a campus they've never been to, students will be able to talk to someone from their own campus. And again, SVA's student with disability leadership collective is being developed with a collectivist approach in mind at the moment. Students with a disability are often too busy dealing with their disability to be able to offer much in the way of student representation, but that doesn't mean that their voices shouldn't or can't be heard. Aside from thinking outside the box about how we might collate those individual voices, I thought of some other ideas that might help. So if we could look at possibly peer support for students with disability from the very beginning so that they might build the supports and the confidence they need to become a student representative in the first place. Further support networking opportunities such as the SVA, Students with Disability Leadership Collective, where student representatives who hold these leadership roles can talk to one another, learn from one another. But these are things that we can do within our individual universities as well. Assume that more than one voice is needed, but if there is only that one voice available, acknowledge that, seek further information, and be honest that maybe not all of the information is forthcoming in this meeting, but I can go and find more and bring it back to you. Create living documents within your organizations that can continually be updated and added to as situations arise. Disability is just so fluid at times. It's very rarely static, so having those living documents that can change as we need them to would be really helpful. Where possible when creating student representative positions such as students as partners, create disability representation in such a way where the student representative is given support, things such as having a mentor or a staff member point person and always have backup plans. We have disability flares, so quite often we'll have a day or a week or even a month or two where we can't be there. But that doesn't mean that we want to lose our position or not come back when that's done. And that's one of our biggest fears is if we can't turn up today, we'll be rejected tomorrow. That happens in life so often and knowing that that won't happen in this aspect would give us a lot of confidence in signing up for these things in the first place. Lastly, I thought maybe offering things like microcredentials in advocacy as an incentive. Disabled students already deal with so much stuff in our lives. Enticement can go a long way. So I'm not sure that anything like that exists at the moment, but I would be really happy in, yeah, I really want to look into that further in the future. So I've started a padlet and I'll put that in the chat in a minute. I was thinking if you guys had any thoughts that you want to offer, I'll keep this padlet up as long as I can so that people can contribute to that at any stage. I think that this is the beginning of a conversation that we all need to have. How we can make disability representation on campuses a whole lot better than what it is at the moment. How we can support disability representatives more than we are at the moment. And finally, if anyone has been triggered by anything in today's presentation, there's some phone numbers here and places you can go for help. So thank you. And if anyone has any questions, please let me know. Thank you so much Bailey. It was an incredibly inspiring session and thank you for sharing your insight and experiences.