 Good afternoon everyone or should I say good morning from Ireland by the time you view this it'll be six or seven a.m. I think my time in County Donegal in Ireland, it's a real pleasure to be with you all and thank you so much for having me at your Student Voice Australia conference. My name is Oshin Hassan, I am the Programme Manager of the National Student Engagement Programme in Ireland. We've had a relationship with Student Voice Australia in the past. My predecessor, Kate Driscoll, will have met some of you I think a number of years ago and since then quite a bit has changed at in step and I'm excited to tell you a bit about that. Today I'll talk to you a bit about some of the themes that you're discussing at your conference particularly around representation engagement and creating sustainability and I think over the last number of years that's been something that we've been really keen to do here in Ireland. It was around the sustainability of Oshin engagement and Oshin partnership practices. So really excited to be with you. It shows the power of online and I think one thing that we've learned from the pandemic is to make the most of our international connections and to build relationships internationally. So what I'm going to do for the next 20-25 minutes or so is introduce and step. Some of you may already be aware of us but tell you a bit about us and what we do here in Ireland. I'm going to explore some of the issues and the themes that I just mentioned that are part of your discussions today but around our experiences in Ireland of trying to enhance and develop and support student engagement and decision making and I'll talk to you a bit about why we use that phrase student engagement and decision making and what that means for us. I want to focus in on some of the challenges that we face and that you may also face and some of the enablers things that support the development of student engagement and student voice and indeed student partnership and how we can support a broad diversity of both students and staff to be involved in these kinds of initiatives and this kind of work. Firstly, a bit about me. I think this bit's always a bit cringe. It's always a bit hard to do but my name is Oshin Hassan. I have been a program manager at EnStep now for almost two years. At EnStep we also have another staff member and we have a number of students who also work with us. Before EnStep I was the Deputy President of the Union of Students in Ireland, USA for two years and that's why I suppose I ended up here. Before that my alma mater was Queen's University Belfast. I'm from the north of the country in Northern Ireland, QUB. I was there in the Student Union for two years there. I was a law student at the time and ended up in the Student Union and I suppose it set me on a path of student engagement ever since. I'm actually a current part-time master's student in Dublin City University. I also do a bit of work internationally. I previously would have been very involved in the European Student Union and in the European Higher Education Area what we call the Bologna process here in Europe and I currently sit on the Quality Board for Icelandic Higher Education so if any of you have seen the recent movie about Eurovision, I saw a lot of very familiar places in Iceland in that movie and I'm dying to get back there again. A bit about EnStep. Effectively what we do is we work to enhance student engagement and decision making and to create a culture where students are partners in their education and that means that they can influence their education, they can influence the learning community and they can influence change in higher education and the way we do that and the strategic priorities we have are to strengthen the value of student engagement at the national level. A bit like what yourselves are doing in student voice Australia, you're trying to look at how to strengthen the value of these concepts and what that means at the national level so that it can have an impact on the local. We do that by developing leadership capabilities of students and that they can take up a full role, they can raise the voice of their peers, that they see that by taking up an influential decision making and partnership position within higher education that they are leaders within the higher education community and that's all students not just student representatives but certainly student representation is core to that and finally that we look to foster and create a culture partnership between students and staff and the students and staff work together to co-create and to develop and to find solutions and create new ideas but also to deal with the day-to-day issues that arise as they do and as we've discovered through the pandemic. We were founded in 2016 so we've been going for about five years now, we recently had our fifth birthday. We were founded by the USA, the Union of Students in Ireland, by our quality assurance agency, the QCARE, Quality and Qualification in Ireland and by our governance and funding body that's the Higher Education Authority so they came together in 2016 realizing that they were all talking about student engagement but they were all talking about it in different ways and for different purposes and they decided it was important to set up a partnership program that could kind of bring together the breadth of ideas the challenges and the problems but also find solutions and ways of ways of bringing the sector together around the common mission. At the time whenever we were launched this report Enhancing Student Engagement and Decision Making was kind of our found in document it set out a conceptual framework and 10 principles of student engagement upon which we started to build our work however since then quite a bit has changed and this document which you'll find on our website was all about reflecting on what we've learned and moving the program forward so that the program at the national level could become sustainable and something that continued to add value for student unions, for students, for staff and for higher education institutions and we've been developing our kind of new framework for student engagement and that's something that I want to talk to you about today. A bit about an overview of some of the activities that we've completed since 2016 and how we operate. We have a participate in network of institutions currently 25 higher education institutions. We ask institutions and their students unions to sign a short partnership agreement to get involved and end step and really to set the tone then that they work together on identifying aims and objectives. We have run a very successful student training program since 2016. We trained over almost four and a half thousand students since 2016 and I'll talk to you a bit about what that training involves and why we do it but it is all about enhancing those leadership capabilities that I talked about. We found this year that participation in the training program increased massively whenever we moved online and we trained 1500 students this year which we're very proud of. We have an institutional support and development stream. You may be aware of institutional analysis workshops that's something that we developed with our friends in Scotland, SPARX. We ran 18 institutional analysis workshops for the first number of years of the program and now we run bespoke partnership workshops. We've created new workshops in the last number of years. Some of that was a bit disrupted by the pandemic but we're certainly looking forward to more institutional support work as people reflect on the pandemic and what happened and then we network and conferences are incredibly important because it brings together people from across the spectrum of activity and higher education to talk about student engagement and I think that's something that's really important to you obviously as well and should invoice Australia. Core to that is our team of student trainers. All of our student training is student led. I don't deliver the training as a program manager it's our students who deliver the training and it's really important that that peer-to-peer representation, that peer-to-peer activity is core. It underpins what NSIP does. We want to practice what we preach and the students can support one another to help to navigate the problems that they encounter to develop their capacities to build that leadership and we work with them and their institutions to take that a step further towards partnership. I mentioned that we've been developing a new framework so our new framework actually you're getting a sneak peek today. It's being launched on Thursday the 27th of May. Steps to partnership is our new framework for authentic student engagement and decision making in Ireland and we're very pleased to at our five-year mark to be producing something that's reflective of the experiences of students and staff in Irish higher education. We've been working through all of our activities and reflecting back and consulting and we've had a project team that developed this framework and it really is a big part of moving forward now for NSIP and making our activity sustainable so that we can really learn from them and find new ways of exploring partnership particularly whenever we're just coming out of the pandemic. I think that's been particularly important for us to reflect at this point and to create a new resource for the sector. So what I wanted to do was take you through a bit of that now and to talk to you what that framework means and hopefully there's something in it for your own discussions and creating that sustainable practice that you're hoping to create. So one of the things that really struck us as we began to do your work over the last number of years is that whatever we said NSIP the National Student Engagement Programme and we talked about student engagement and decision making and students as partners there were so many different perspectives on what that meant. What that meant within different contexts within different institutions to each individual depending on the role that each individual carried out be that in quality assurance, be that a course or class rep, be that a student union officer or the head that we have a president of our universities here you probably have vice-chancellors it means something different to everyone and that made it quite difficult to actually get across the value of what it was we were trying to do so whenever we're training students whenever we're running our analysis workshops what is it we're trying to achieve and we found that that was quite difficult at times so it was very important whenever we were developing steps to partnership that we really got stuck into what these concepts mean and we think it's very important that in your institutions within your universities you develop that shared sense of what these concepts mean so that you can more effectively communicate what the purpose of them is and what the value is to each person who tries to shape the student voice who tries to shape a culture of partnership and I suppose you can view student voice student engagement student partnership as a bit of a journey. It is also a continuous loop of activity and I think that's very important to set out but we've set out that student voice student engagement and student partnership are interlinked concepts but they're not the same because we often found that people were using student voice and student engagement and student partnership to mean the same thing but I suppose my challenge to use do you use them interchangeably? Do you use them to mean the same thing? We view student voice as the act the student actively raising their voice to get across their opinions and their perspectives. We view student engagement as the opportunities that students and staff begin to find to begin to collaborate to share ideas to find solutions and to create a kind of working relationship where student partnership is where that collaboration really emerges and you find within partnership then there is that shared responsibility there are co-ownership over the processes that happen in higher education and that both students and staff can see that they created the outcomes that they created the solutions and I suppose that's the difference between partnership and engagement and voice for us is that unless the voice of students is being actively included it's perhaps not necessarily engagement and I suppose you may have seen this quote before that all partnership is student engagement but not all student engagement is partnership and for us I'd ask a slightly different question is all student voice student engagement? My answer to that my god instinct is to say no to that because students can be raising their voice we may be listening and we may have heard what they said but have we actually worked with them engaged with students to then seek to build that partnership and I suppose that's my challenge to you based on our experiences is that unless we start to unpick the differences between those things and the way in which student voice and engagement creates a journey towards partnership I think it's difficult to reach that end goal of partnership without really starting to unpick what's currently happening so you know if students are filling in a survey but at no point after the completion of the survey do students and staff then sit down to try and look at the data and to understand the data and what students have said have you gone beyond student voice to student engagement and have you found ways to try and act together on the findings of that kind of exercise so that's what I would say to you while all partnership is student engagement not all student engagement is partnership and I think it goes without saying in terms of student voice as well that we must act on the student voice and the student voice must go beyond simply raising opinions it needs to be actively included in a participative partnership environment so whenever we were creating steps to partnership we've been leading this kind of cross-sectoral student staff collaboration now for over a year we're trying to practice what we preach in Ireland particularly around developing that national understanding of those different phrases and trying to understand what that means for current practice you know to support students and staff to understand where they are on the journey they will be at different points on that journey depending on what kind of activities it is that they're carrying out so it's really important to be able to be able as a national program to help people to do that kind of work and to have that really honest and open discussion with each other and particularly because student engagement and higher education has evolved in Ireland over time and I hope that NSEP has played a part in that but it has provided both with develop and steps to partnership as a framework and the impact of the pandemic it has provided an opportunity for us to reflect on sustainability of the practices we've been working on over the last number of years the work that students and staff have been doing together has it been sustainable during the pandemic have we taken a step backwards I think that's something really important for every higher education system to really consider and certainly in Ireland I think it's something that we will be focused on over the next year if not number of years some of the key challenges that we tried to outline or discuss in in our project team for the framework was to say well actually what are the things that we need to avoid if we're developing this framework what are the things that we've learned from from our training program from our institutional support from our workshops all of those things and here's some of the I think the key things to think about the sustainability of student engagement practices and developing that partnership model and it is that we really need to be very cognizant of the power dynamics and the power relationships of higher education there are traditional higher education who are the decision makers so if you know if I'm tasked with working on student engagement and decision making who are the decision makers and I suppose we're unconscious bias immediately thinks of of institutional management and that's fair enough I think acknowledging that that is a part of the traditional hierarchy and the power dynamic of higher education is the first step towards trying to rebalance it and to find work and strategies for everyone to kind of share the ownership of that power and share out the way in which that power interacts with the learning community and how decisions are then taken not all power dynamics are bad and I think acknowledging that is the first step to acknowledging that some power dynamics and power relationships need to change information asymmetry or that idea that not everyone has access to the same information student engagement for us has all been around building the capacity of both students and the staff across all roles to start to navigate and understand the policy environment of higher education and how that can create barriers or indeed opportunities so sharing knowledge and building individual and group expertise and how higher education works is really important and I'm going to come back to that a bit with a case study towards the end for the purposes of co-creating and co-developing your engagement predefined or predetermined outcomes I think we all need to always take a step back and say yes I personally have a vision of where things are going but I need to make sure that I don't impose that vision or impose those ideas those ideas should be raised in a way that allows everyone to interact with them and for everyone to open their arms to say actually I think we need to try something different here and that requires us not to have restrictive roles from the outset you know the student reps only interact with some elements of what we do and it goes back to the idea of power dynamics do power dynamics pigeonhole us does it only allow us to to to interact with some elements of decision making I think that's very important and in the end of the day that should allow us the space to revise our ideas to revise our opinions and actually hold our hands up and say okay we need to change the way in which we do things and perhaps there's lots to learn for all of us here and crucially for us democracy is an underpinning driver of student engagement in Ireland democratic learning communities it is very important obviously student unions have votes all of the time you're electing your representatives so we don't necessarily mean that every aspect of the institution should be electing people that's not what we mean but genuine participative democracy means that the accessibility of student engagement is incredibly important for for everyone and that means that you have to be able to see change happen as a result of the opinions and the input that you provide and the time that you give to that so this is what emerged from our discussions over the past year and a half this is our steps to partnership framework for student engagement and decision making and creating that authentic culture I'm not going to go into the detail of this today but this is a sneak peek of what we're going to launch on Thursday we're going to launch an interactive version on our website and we're very excited to do that with with our partners all across Ireland what I would say to you is and I'm going to go into a few elements of it at the center of this at the core are the four domains of student engagement in blue and those four domains are governance and management teaching and learning quality assurance and enhancement and student representation and organization and for us those four domains is where the action happens this is where the partnerships develop student representation wasn't originally a core domain of student engagement in Ireland that is new that has been added and and I think it's one of the core learnings that we've had was that all of the projects that NSTEP has developed since 2016 had student representation at its core all of the projects we had only worked if we had effective student representation systems in our universities and in our colleges so it was a blindingly obvious error that that was not included as a domain in that if if the people involved in governance and management and in teaching and learning and quality assurance or driving forward student engagement so too were the student reps the students unions and the student representation structures without them you know progress was slow or wouldn't be made at all so those four parts of the institution must work in tandem to create systematic approaches to improving student engagement to develop student partnership and ensure that the student voice is heard and included throughout decision making and that's a key change for us is that those domains are the way in which we say to institutions creating really effective cultures of partnership to create an inclusive learning community where everyone has a role to play in that learning community where there is reflection and a sense of critique and being able to evaluate what it is that you're doing and that it is underpinned by genuine democratic practices that those domains must work in tandem with one another in order to make that happen and to live the principles of student engagement in order to really bring people on that journey of student voice through student engagement towards student partnership I want to touch just very briefly on our five principles we originally had ten five or excuse me we had ten principles we've now created five and and like I said earlier with student voice and engagement of partnership this is also a bit of a journey it is also a bit of a continuous look the way we explain our principles are that in order for effective and meaningful student engagement to happen you must build a dialogue and dialogue is more than just good communication and I think we learned a lot about good communication during the pandemic dialogue is about a more open a more open conversation where both students and staff can come to that dialogue with a shared sense of purpose they understand why they're a part of that dialogue they have a shared sense of knowledge they perhaps have an understanding of what they where their knowledge gaps are that they can have a more honest and robust discussion and what dialogue means is it's multi-directional communication it's not just a two-way street it also means that you're open to change in your mind so it's much more than just having a discussion or a conversation or simply communicating information back and forward there's something it's something meaningful that at the end of the dialogue something emerges something changes and that there are there are agreed outcomes to some extent through dialogue and student engagement you build trust between the partners and between the different individuals and groups involved that trust is is essential to sustainability particularly as you try to hand over processes as you make progress you don't want to lose that progress because obviously everything changes in higher education quite quickly students move on staff move on so building that trust is really key to sustainability of practice equity and inclusive ideas are next principle and I don't just mean that we have diverse student and staff populations involved in in student engagement that also the processes and the initiatives and the activities themselves are accessible and diverse and that we that we have a really meaningful diverse and vibrant student engagement activity across the institution and that does mean that we make traditional governance structures traditional processes for quality assurance that all of that becomes more inclusive and more open through that inclusivity particularly you you empower an empowerment is about developing that shared sense of knowledge and that shared sense of capacity to be a part of the conversation and from that this is where genuine co-creation happens the students aren't just a part of the process they are part of creating the product what is the outcome of that dialogue and that trust-building relationship our five enablers are a brand new part of what we do here in Ireland and particularly will be will be a big part of what we're going to be doing going forward over the next five years hopefully and I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that now but this is this is a part of our framework that I would say definitely go and have a look at and it's around reflecting on what were the challenges for Irish higher education and these these five enablers reflect the challenges that our students and staff have faced over the last five years and it was around sustainability was was the fifth one of sustainability of what what how do we continue to do what we do how do we build momentum when people constantly change and leave higher education and for us the action points that we've set out in our framework are really key to that so I'm going to take the five enablers and just do a bit of a case study with you because I know we don't have a lot of time but our national student training programme is the one that I'll use to to detail that for you so our student training programme very briefly was developed five years ago as an introductory training programme for student representatives or course representatives as you may know them or class representatives it was an introductory programme that lasted for three hours with class reps it was all around the the class rep role what that means within higher education about how to represent your peers effectively to represent feedback to gather feedback and to talk about the student learning experience but on reflection I think the reason why the student training programme emerged was that people felt that students weren't able to fully participate in the process of of representation of understanding higher education but the training programme was only ever going to be the first step of doing that it had to be a part of a wider systematic change within higher education and and I think to begin with it had a very strong purpose but over the years as we've realised partnership requires more than just training and I think a lot of people began to realise that as time went on so with the sector we devised a revised training programme and an improved training programme and it was around making training and student representation itself more accessible it was about creating more training opportunities so that reps could build that knowledge that I've talked about so that they really could navigate higher education so that it's not just about gathering feedback that actually genuinely reps could understand the policy and the way in which governance worked in their institutions that they could really influence how staff do things and that then they could take up a really key part of that decision making close back to who are the decision makers and if we're just training them to gather feedback and to talk about student learning experience are they decision makers arguably not so how did we elevate that creating recognition for student representatives was very important so that they could see the value of the roles that they take up and then creating more and more training beyond the introductory level but also creating more opportunity for staff and students to work together and I'd be really keen to hear some of your own ideas and how you do that in Australia and for us there was a couple of things that we've done we've used the pandemic as our opportunity to do new things in this space we moved in online we moved an online system we developed and rolled out our training program online we created additional content so that reps could then take up new training opportunities on an online portal they could read more guidance and resources around what the role of the class rep could be beyond what what they believed it was that the recognition award system we built allowed them to communicate the value of the role to a greater diversity of people to a wider audience not just within higher education but also into wider society particularly because we are founded on on principles of democracy and citizenship and this would allow us then to create more advanced opportunities for student representation within institutions and the reason for that is because we've talked for a long time about the role of the student representative as as part of a life cycle and when you think about that sustainability there's there is there's a big issue that you only spend a year on the role you probably spend the first half of the year trying to figure out what the role is and then the second half trying to put that into action and what we need to move to is a system where if we've if we've learned that student representation is a big driving force behind everything that we do then we need to find ways to more sustainably support people from the beginning to build relationships and to expand their role to expand their knowledge more quickly but efficiently as well in a way that doesn't overburden people to involve more of their classmates to involve more staff and then to reward and recognize that so they continue to communicate the value of that role that to continue to take up roles within higher education as they move forward and particularly to allow us to communicate that to the people who come after them so thinking about our five enablers this allowed us to really to really think about our strategy as a program going forward and to support institutions to develop training and capacity building programs for students and staff that would allow them to expand what we call student experts and I think it's probably a phrase that you've all heard so whenever we think about the capacity building enabler we want to build the capacity of students to really be the experts in their own learning and that they can they can communicate that expertise that they have so moving beyond the introductory we needed to look at what kind of knowledge and influence could students have and what are the things that we need to do to provide that knowledge and those development opportunities for them so moving beyond simply just gathering feedback and communicating with their class what additionally needs to happen there institutional approaches if I if I if I send student trainers out all across the country to train students on how to engage with staff our staff and their institutions engaging I think you know you lose a sense of momentum if students feel empowered in their role they've had their training they know what the role is and they go out but actually they find barriers in their way so there needs to be systematic institutional approaches to make sure that the higher education institution itself is engaging so that when students take up a role that they are they don't face barriers across the system it comes back to that point about who are the decision makers and then the end of the day there are people within the institution with more influence and we have to work with them to try and navigate what those barriers might be for policies and processes higher education is a complex environment there are lots of policies and processes that I don't necessarily understand and others won't either because we're all kind of siloed we all have different roles and responsibilities imagine what that's like then for students particularly trying to navigate all of that and all of that information so co-owned strategies for engagement need to happen across those four domains as I mentioned so that can influence how policy interacts with the actual practicalities of student partnership developing communities of practice means that we need to share our knowledge we need to share our governance spaces and we need to genuinely understand what a learning community with students as influencers and decision makers looks like how do we know that students are a key part of decision-making if we're not communicating the successes and finally sustainability we should view transition and people moving on as an enabler not a problem I think we've all it's always been said this from a sustainability point of view students always move on that's a big problem actually I would say flip that on its head it's not a problem it's an opportunity so looking at effective milestones and life cycles for representation for engagement how do we create goals and objectives together that as people move on they feel they made an impact and they can say to the people coming behind them that was a really worthwhile thing to do I think that's something that we're often missing it's the people Lee feeling that they didn't make the impact that they wanted to make and that's what we need to change we're developing some new projects and resources here in Ireland particularly around post grads about representing the diversity of the student the student voice and the student body creating more online opportunities so that people can really see where they can have an impact and the policies and practices of higher education we're developing a short course for staff so that we can mirror our training program on the staff side of the house and really start to join the dots of student partnership and that'll really support us to create more more resources and more institutional support so that institutions and student unions can more actively work together develop partnership initiatives so that's all for me I think I've gone a little bit over time just again thank you very much for having me I'm really looking forward to some questions and ideas and maybe some really good discussion do get in touch with us visit our website should engage with .ie we're on twitter we're on youtube and we're on linkedin and I'm always available to chat at any time so thank you very much wow thank you very much for that oh sheen that was fantastic I think I speak for everybody who who watched the presentation it really thank you for sharing such an impressive initiative I think you know it from where I sit it just looks enviable the national you know as a national initiative it's it's fantastic the impressive it's very interesting to hear your reflections on the the journey you've been on in in end step and the learning that that that you've taken from that journey and thank you for sharing in advance that sneak peek of the new framework because the coherence of it the kind of solid conceptual foundations the kind of multifaceted joined up coherence of it I think is is really very very helpful and I think there are a number of challenges embedded within it and it's certainly within your you know your presentation to us that we should you know that for us and that that we can take on board and and engage with so I'm excited to have this this discussion now this opportunity for discussion with you I see we have three questions already in the q&a I'm going to encourage participants please do add more we've got almost 20 minutes to to to speak with oh sheen and and I'm sure that there are lots of questions and comments that you have um let's go to the first question um and um now I'll I'll read out the first one and then perhaps hand over to you coming to take this session building towards a democratic institution and society is a brilliant trajectory but it requires democratic capacity amongst every student that's one of the biggest stumbling blocks engaging all so we've had quite a lot of discussion today about how do we reach out and engage all students or or give students opportunities genuine opportunities to engage across across their diversity um what are some of the ways that you have found to engage students beyond the student union or association thank you for for having me and and for that for that very interesting question it comes up very often for us I think we have a fairly a fairly robust and strong system of of student unions in Ireland and I don't just say that because I'm biased because that that's that's my particular background but of course as is the case with student unions everywhere it's it's a huge challenge to engage people in those kind of democratic cultures and within those organizations and of course then you know for students to give their time not only to the activities of a student union but to the activities within uh within the class environment as a representative of of of the rest of their peers within perhaps wider partnership opportunities and I think that's one of the things that we probably need to be cognizant of I think it's it's not that it's um it's not that it's a competition for students time I think if we create engagement or partnership opportunities that that create a competition where people feel that they only have so many hours to give they only have so much time and energy to give particularly whenever we think about our experiences during the pandemic I think we've all certainly learned about what that means um I think you know inclusive democratic cultures within the institution means that the different elements of the institution do need to be talking to one another they do need to be planning strategically at what all of this means I think our partnership activities first and foremost one of the things that we need to do is link upper partnership activities very clearly with the people who do already volunteer their time it's okay to admit that that's that's a crucial audience you know if you aren't capturing that audience of people who are already engaged and who are already trying to seek out opportunities and who may already be interested I think you know I think that's where you start if you have a if you have a grip of a few hundred people perhaps depending on the size of the institution you know utilize that uh but utilize that together so that that the opportunities they take up they can see the connections between those so whether or not it's engaging with with their peers and in the likes of a student council or something like that versus engaging with staff at a program level or engaging with staff and students student leaders at an institutional level that that all of those things you know start to map those out in an institution uh I think from there you start to build broader more accessible opportunities for the wider student audience because you can demonstrate the the change that can happen through taking up roles like that a democratic culture requires transparency um and if people don't feel that those opportunities are are if people don't feel that the institution or those opportunities exist they're not going to seek those opportunities number one and when the opportunities do come up they're not going to find them of interest they're going to shrug their shoulders and say actually that's not for me I I don't think I'd get very far with that so I think at an institutional level those domains that I talked about need to be talking to one another yeah that's really good point and I think that's something that um here at the University Ascension Coast we've struggled with as well and and how do you create this awareness and you know so that that engagement level starts feeding into it so yeah thank you for that I have to mention that the entire throughout the entire presentation I was madly taken notes and I couldn't quite keep up with all my thoughts with what you were saying so lots to learn um so I'm just going to go to the next question what um from Kate mentioning was it hard to bring the 10 principles down to five what process did you go through to decide on the five you arrived at yes it was um I think it's important Kate I think myself and Kate talked about these principles uh quite a long time ago the the principles were created you know 2014-2015 and launched as part of the of launching the end step and I think what's important for us now is to be able to say well we launched we launched those two things together as a sector and this this program has now existed for five years and that the what we have now is a reflection of what we've learned over the last five years um and the the broader opportunities that we've created to come together as a sector of of very diverse institutions um and students and staff from all sorts of backgrounds and interests it was difficult to bring them down to five but actually it was it was easier than I thought it was going to be and and I think it's because of the way we created them this time versus the way they emerged the previous time and and because because they were I suppose to an extent and this is perhaps unfair creating things by committee is difficult um I think I think everyone will have had an experience of that of trying to get people into your room and and craft something by committee uh and the constant redrafting and going back and maybe discussing smaller points I think if we actually we took a step back from what we had uh and tried to to some extent start from scratch um if I think if we had a fairly robust conversation where we didn't get bogged down and how many do we change how many do we want we didn't say we want to go from 10 to 5 that's not how we started we actually started with well well what's important to us and we went back to the drum board to some extent and it's because our experience now is totally different to what it was in 2014 2015 our expertise and and ideas and all of those things have changed so there was no point in trying to take the 10 principles that we had and and recraft them or re or chop off a couple of them and and try to relabel a few of them what we actually needed to do was begin again and say well actually what do we know now um what did we not know then what do we wish we'd know and what are the and crucially what are the uncomfortable conversations that we couldn't have back then um what are the things we're more open to discussing now and I suppose some of those things I'll give an example one of our previous principles was professionalism and that word's fine but I think it lived at a time when when there was a lot of frustration in the sector where student engagement activity maybe wasn't perhaps people didn't feel empowered or listened to they didn't feel that there was a there was a cohesive national discussion um and professionalism came up uh and I think to a student reading that certainly what we got back was will you're telling me to be professional isn't it it's not it's not everyone being professional you're telling me that I'm not the professional in the room it's actually been able to go back and have those uncomfortable conversations again now and say well actually you know we're you know that's not what we meant but here's what we've learned since then and and I think that's been really important for us really good point there I think and it can become using certain words like that refers back to your your power dynamics as well that you're asking somebody else you know you need to act up to our level of professionalism and vice versa and so yeah I get that that makes sense um going on to another question I'm just going to try my best to to get what you mean here Kathleen and please let me know if I haven't quite got exactly what you're asking but um what do you think about questioning and discussing the language uh being titles or roles within uh we use within our institutions for example students versus learners participants clients um and or lecturers teachers facilitators overall do you think it is an important conversation to have or not really is it just being semantics uh and can we get a distinction can we be a distraction to the actual action or outcomes to cultural change it's a great question um I don't think it's semantics but I do think it's a distraction I suppose is my short answer and I don't mean that you know it's distraction can be a negative thing I actually you know I don't think it's a negative thing I think it's just more of a what kind of what's the most valuable conversation to have and it's it's the role title or what the role means and I would say talk about what the role means what you know I think we have a view of what a student does and what what a staff member does and actually I think we should change the the role descriptor rather than the the title um because we're never going to find the title that's it's everyone or if anything the title sort of things and that's I think that's probably why the question's been asked the titles create the the distraction and they create the controversy and and it creates that debate but in reality I think what we need to do is on pick a bit more we'll you know come back to this idea of the decision makers um if everyone is a decision maker what are the ways in which they achieve that through the roles that that they have because like I said not all power dynamics are bad higher education is always going to employ people um there are always going to be teachers and academics there are always going to be quality assurance uh uh officers there are always going to be institutional leaders and managers um and then there are always going to be students who take up different roles with different interests uh get elected into positions uh are employed perhaps by the institution to do particular roles so I actually think it's all about how does how do all of those things fit together rather than getting too distracted by the titles um we've avoided going into all of the various titles and different descriptions that are used internationally we've stuck simply to students as partners um and stuck with that kind of to avoid that debate to some extent but I do think we're going to pick that up again and and start to and start to pull apart some of those different ideas that have emerged all around the world around students as you know students as experts students as partners all of those various different uh themes I think what's important is for us now you know you have a growing body of students as interns and students being employed on to staff teams now and I think things like that change power dynamics but they can also be you know we can all we can do that wrong we can do that wrong as well and I think actually we have to have those discussions rather than what we call people necessarily but I do think identity and role titles are still very important and I don't distract from that I think that came up through our work with post grads identity within the learning community was very vague for them very often they felt that they were in a gray area so and I think that goes for everyone everybody has a sense of identity within the learning community and sometimes that has has has a negative feeling and a negative sense and it can it can frustrate their ability to actually feel like a engaged or or indeed a partner wonderful thank you so much um just as a couple of comments that came through um um were discussions around the the different differentiations between you know student voice to student engagement to student partnership and what that actually truly looks like and I think you know just as a passing comment I suppose it's not so much of a question on my end um but I really like that clear clear line and I think that goes for everybody else um the comments coming in everyone seemed really like seeing that and and I think it's not done as often as what it should be um one last question before we finish up for the day is again from Kate here who says um as someone who has been working in the space for a really long time now both as a student leader and as a coordinator of n-step how do you maintain your energy enthusiasm to drive um well certainly during the pandemic I think it's it's tested the resolve at times it's it's very frustrating and I'm sure you'll all share my sense of this this space that is all about collaboration um and it's it's all about changing the way it is about changing the way we do things I think in higher education we do you often do everything by committee we try to do everything by agenda and actually with with work like this it's about kind of pushing beyond that and leaving the agenda open and trying and trying to bring people together and to work together uh based on everybody's own lived experiences that's been incredibly difficult during all of this I think um but it can also be difficult in general in this space because I suppose when it comes to other aspects of higher education they're quite rigid or or they're you know big priority areas within higher education and the development of it um quality assurance internationalization all of those things that they take up a lot of time on higher education agendas that you know people have very set goals and very set ideas of where those things need to go and shouldn't engagement and shouldn't voice and all of those things are very open-ended um and not enough time is spent trying to identify what what Vanilla was saying earlier about shared shared goals shared objectives shared aims those things are very important but it takes a lot of time to craft those because you are trying to avoid setting out and stone what you think uh and imposing ideas and allowing everyone this space and higher education doesn't work like that I think very often it doesn't it doesn't work in that very open-ended way it you know the job needs to get done in the end of the day and I think that can be hard for people then to continue with uh and stick with it I mean I have the job to do it uh and I am in a privileged position in that sense um but I think we all get that sense of are we making enough progress and that can that can be quite tiring I think just going back very briefly because I want to pick it up um that idea of shouldn't voice shouldn't engage with shouldn't partnership and I wanted to say it in my presentation I completely forgot to say it shouldn't voice isn't the poor relation of shouldn't partnership um even though it is a kind of continuum and it's a journey it you know all of those things are very important and I think that's what I wanted to get across was that you know for someone to raise their lived experiences talk about it and to be a part of of raising their voice even if it is anonymous in a survey that's still incredibly important and partnership can't emerge partnership can't happen without that voice because the voice adds the honesty to it um and I think that's you know that that for me is the crucial part so even though partnership and engagement activity takes a lot of time and effort and collaboration and a lot of frustration at times and does take a lot to maintain your drive remember that that even the smallest contributions to building that voice and that shared sense of direction that that's incredibly important wonderful thank you so much um but yeah there's so many thoughts and ideas going through my head I just want to go and apply them all um but what I might do instead is pass it back over to Phil who might finish us up for the day thank you Carmen and um thank you so much again Oshine that was a fantastic presentation and also really interesting um Q&A and I'm sure we could have you know gone on for quite a lot longer um talking with you and learning from your experience and and an insight thank you for that I've written down several things that that you said um thinking about the the journey and the um and the question of um this is so sustainability is one of our themes and you made that real kind of little light bulb went on in my head um around this question of transition um and sort of student you know transition from one student cohort to the next and and and I think that connects actually a little bit to what you're saying about keeping keeping on keeping on you know um and and and sort of keeping the passion keeping the purpose but also this this idea of keeping looking at transition as an opportunity not a problem and I really really love that and maybe that's something to you know that's my take one of my takeaways not only perhaps in relation to the transitions but you know we have been looking at challenges um throughout this discussion but you know with every challenge there isn't um an opportunity uh rather than a problem and it's it is very exciting so thank you for that again I would have liked to ask you more and and I think this is something I'd love to do through the network um about something you said about um have we well you said how we have all you asked have we taken a step back during the pandemic and then you said but maybe the pandemic's an opportunity to do new things and again I think that that's a really interesting question because we're right in the middle of this extraordinary moment and I think there are lots of things we can leverage for the student voice and engagement and partnership that relate to this this this this this quite extraordinary kind of catalytic moment in in the sector transformative moment um anyway enough from me just to say thank you so much thank you to um everybody all presenters today who have made such a great contribution uh thank you to um Rachel who's been um drawing this wonderful visual for us um to capture um the themes and and insights it's going to be great to have that as we as we go forward um I hope everybody has had a great um a great experience today we look forward to um seeing you again on Thursday and continuing on with our discussions and no doubt having uh lots of uh excellent um excellent fantastic presentations on on Thursday afternoon thank you to my team uh at Adelaide you are wonderful it takes a lot to pull something like this together and we've experimented with some new uh some new methods and techniques doing this online um so I really do appreciate that uh thank you to Carmen my lovely co-host um and um take care everybody um enjoy the next couple of days and see you very soon