 We are off. Go for it, Helen. Thank you very much. And I'm absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to present for the Virtual International Day of the Midwife. So by way of an introduction to my presentation, I just wanted to let you know that I work as an educator within pre- and post-registration midwifery here in the United Kingdom. And the United Kingdom, I think, has found the midwifery profession is much more globally engaged and outward looking. And this presentation sets out my individual experiences in trying to engage in these agendas. So I'm going to outline what sparked my interest in internationalization and talk about this ongoing process that I've been engaged with to develop myself as a professional. And I'm going to share with you a very simple tool that I've developed, which has been derived from a freely available resource here in the United Kingdom. I've got the reference at the end for you to have a look at. It's relevant for many audiences internationally. I'm going to explain a little bit more later, but it's just to say that the tool I've created is based on an international framework and so we can use it across the globe, so whether by educators, clinicians, or students. So according to your individual needs or interests, and so I really hope that it will be of value to you wherever you are. I put in the title, No Passport, No Problem, because it really is a case of trying to engage in internationalization without necessarily having to travel. It's about trying to tap into your resources, communications, your networks, and thinking about opportunities for virtual engagement. I'm trying to think about what's going to be possible for you and what's most relevant to you too. So after our presentation finishes, I really would be happy to welcome questions and debate offline as well. So I'm going to, in a second, I'm going to talk about internationalization just to give a definition, which I hope will be useful. But I think it's valuable to know that in the United Kingdom, to train to be a midwife, it's undergraduate or master's level and also we have post-registration education and all of this takes place in universities within higher education. So the definition of internationalization that I'm going to use actually comes from the Higher Education Academy and they are a body that works across the United Kingdom to support higher education institutions in learning and teaching quality to try and enhance the student learning experience. And they provide a definition of internationalization which just follows. So it's trying to seek a context to promote a high quality, equitable, and global learning experience to help prepare graduates to live in and contribute responsibly to a globally interconnected society. So obviously that's really important for our midwives as graduates and it same applies to graduates of any discipline. And obviously for midwifery, we're trying to ensure that for our midwives, the graduate experience isn't just locally and nationally focused, but they have an international, a global outlook and trying to think about global communities and for midwives to be able to be aware of and engage across the globe, for example, in things like this Sustainable Development Goals. But it's also thinking about internationalization as a means of trying to be responsible and connected to our local communities, thinking about the more diverse populations in the United Kingdom and for our midwives to be able to provide culturally sensitive and holistic care. And also obviously it's really important for them to think about longer term careers as well and how internationalization and greater global engagement will feature. So I wanted as well on the next slide just to talk a little bit about my origins and how I came to devise the tool and to be interested in internationalization. And really it stems from three areas. First of all, with the first one here, I found that a change of role enabled me to engage much more with post-registration students and particularly international students. And this was in some master's programs that I was involved in, which were nursing, midwifery, global health and public health. And I found that that enabled me to communicate and explore ideas within sessions with students from a wide range of countries. And I actually found that that was incredibly valuable for my role and made me ask myself lots more questions, made me think more deeply about some of the literature I was reading when it was actually produced, when it was discussed with students from those countries. I also found that my role enabled me to engage more with international colleagues. And again, it was another great source of learning and reflection and developed greater personal insights and learning for me. And so within my role, during this period, I just found that being more internationally connected, more internationally engaged, it made me think about my continued professional development. And as part of this, I applied for senior professional fellow recognition with the Higher Education Academy in the UK. And in doing that, it was a valuable means in trying to enable me to reflect on and document my learning. So it helps support my continued professional development. So as part of this, I wanted to think about internationalization. And so I tried to look to see what resources I could use and ways in which I could try and mark my learning, but also to extend it. And the resource that I found most useful, I'm going to introduce, I'm on the next page. And this is the Internationalization Higher Education Framework, which was produced by the Higher Education Academy. So it looks like quite a busy slide, so I'm going to talk you through it. And also it's valuable to note that this document is actually really valuable. It's a very flexible and holistic tool. And as I say, it's available online freely for those of you who are interested in accessing it. So first of all, really at the heart of the framework is the aim to support graduates in the 21st century, as it says, to live and contribute to a globally interconnected society. So that's at the heart of the framework. And then around it, as you can see, the framework can be used very flexibly according to your needs, as at the level of individuals with people, a curriculum that you might be looking to introduce or to enhance, and also obviously organizational level. And then within that, it's useful to look here at the different areas that support the framework. Here we can see activity. So these activities here are all ones, if you want to take a moment to read them, that which relate to supporting internationalization. And in addition to the doing activity, there's also the knowledge elements. And again, if you want to take a moment to have a look at those, so aspects of knowledge that will be useful to support internationalization for the student experience. And then finally, the last part of the triangle here is around values. And again, this is really key to the work of a higher education academy, but it's trying to understand that, to undertake this activity, to develop knowledge, we need to have values here, which are indicated, which support the ethos too. So the way that I use this framework was actually at my individual level for my own professional development. So I use it at the people level. And so in this framework, whilst it provides lots of information and suggestions, it's not prescriptive at all, and you can use it as a safe for different purposes. And for myself, I used it to as a self-reflective audit on my work to try and see how I was doing with regard to internationalization and how I could extend my activity. And so what I found helpful was that within the framework, there's a set of questions for each of the different levels. So for people or questions you can ask for a curriculum or questions for your organization. So I looked at the questions that were around focusing on individuals. And I've got on the next two slides just an example. There's eight questions and I've got examples of three of them, which give just a flavor of the different questions that there are, which try to encompass the activity, knowledge and value. So here's the first one for you to read. And now just two other examples. Again, I'll give you time just to read those. So as you can see, they're quite broad, quite holistic. And if you're interested, you can see the other questions in the framework online. And so my next aspect of my work was to try and think about, well, how can I try and capture that? And they don't provide in the framework any tool to do that. So I developed my own tool to try and see if I could find a way to measure up to see how I was doing in terms of internationalization and how I could extend my work. So the brief was really quite a challenging one. And so I wanted to create a tool that would audit. So it would benchmark my achievement in evidence it, but also to go beyond that. So provide opportunities to capture some of the critical reflection and learning that I really felt that I was experiencing through my work. I also wanted to make sure that it was something that was quite dynamic and I wanted to use it for action planning. So in terms of thinking about further activities that are generated from actually documenting down what I was doing, how I could extend it and then later to re-order it. And so really in summary, what I tried to create was something that Ash and Clayton have summed up quite nicely in this little quote here. So it was to try and engage in record an integrative analytical capacity building process rather than superficial navel-gazing exercise. So I wanted to not just document but go beyond that. So the tool I created is quite simple. It really, it's not anything too fancy. So hopefully something that might appeal to you that you might want to go and explore. What I did was I looked at the eight questions posed by the framework and I devised a scale of one to nine to try and just audit how I was doing. So I've got a traffic light system here. So I used one to three for sort of limited and basic, going to my ambus of more intermediate improving and then to work towards seven to nine for doing well to excelling. And then in addition to actually trying to put on a number to sort of rate how I was doing, I also then included below some sections for the following. So we had first of all evidence of achievement and I gave them examples I wanted to use for reflection. So I was able to document some of them in greater depth with learning and reflection. And then to summarise at the end, I then documented down ideas for improvements and actions that I wanted to undertake to enhance my learning further and then where relevant, I include the target dates to do that. So next slide just gives a brief indication of how I felt I scored. It was quite a subjective process, but as you can see really quite sort of variable but mainly in the sort of the middling section in the sort of the RNG amber. And so for example here, this question was around engaging in sort of activities that would support my individual learning. We've got examples of developing networks, attending conferences and courses and cultural events. So I felt I was doing fairly well with that. Item D here, this was around the question about enhancing understanding academic benefits, the value of contributing to or participating in activities associated with internationalisation. And I thought that was sort of slightly my strongest one in that I'd really did feel there was great benefits that I'd identified. But I think it links quite well with, for example, and this last one here, which is question H. And this was about how well I was doing in terms of leading and supporting others to reflect on and engage in continual learning and development in relation to internationalisation. And that I felt was my weakest one. I didn't feel that I was exerting any influence and it was really quite early days. So just to give a little bit more illustration then of the traffic lights, I've just got an example here from some of the evidence that I've put down, learning and reflection and action for one of the questions which was around question A. So one example, how I'd evidenced my achievements was around when we hosted a month long visit from four midwifery tutors from Malawi who came to visit us on a Commonwealth professional fellowships, which was really valuable. It was great to engage in with these women professionally and personally. It was a really rich and valuable experience. Here we've got in the next one, learning and reflection. This arose from an informal discussion when we had some African visitors to the university when quite early on in the trip, they asked me whether or not they would encounter racism on the streets of Aberdeen, which is where I was then working. And I have to say that really took me by surprise. I found this quite a challenging issue that I hadn't anticipated it and it was obviously quite uppermost in their minds and this did cause me to think as a white UK citizen, this was an experience I'd had but it was a genuine concern for visitors. So what I did in terms of trying to then move that forward was trying to then think about how I could use that reflection to try and make improvements and change. And what I did here was to then think about the experiences of our international students on post-registration and postgraduate courses. So I looked at trying to improve how I was communicating issues around the genders that were trying to prevent racism, trying to promote equality and promote diversity that were operating at the university. My action as a program leader to try and ensure that students were well-prepared for the programs and that didn't feel uncomfortable, for example, with issues that might be anticipated around facing any racism that they were, particularly that shouldn't happen and where to go for support in the future. So that just gives hopefully a little bit of a flesh on the bones of one of the questions that I looked at and I did that for all the eight questions. And so moving on towards summarizing now, my key learning and reflection on using the tool was that it was really valuable in terms of being able to benchmark and score myself. So it was quite a crude process. It was really good to see where I felt I needed to work on more and how I was doing. I was really pleased to be able to have the opportunity to evidence some of the reflective elements of learning because I did find that my learning was really quite profound in terms of insights into myself as an individual and a professional, as a midwife that was useful to be able to document. And they focused around, for example, aspects such as my increased learning around cultural competence and also cultural humility. And then they get the topics that I'm exploring at the moment that are quite important. Also, key learning I think was that and the tool that I devised and the framework that it's based on really quite flexible and holistic. So even though this has worked for me, there may be ways in which you want to use the tool and also the framework to see what's most important to you as an individual or within your networks and communities or institution. And also, this is something that I've kept live. I found it's very much a dynamic activity. It's enabled me to increase my engagement and internationalization and my knowledge of it and it's something that's ongoing as I develop as a professional. So looking forward, as I said, I am maintaining the self-reflective audit in a new role, so I've changed institutions and it's made me look afresh at my tool and to be able to think about how I want to use it with within a different workplace and working again with undergraduate students. Something else that's been quite interesting is that the Higher Education Academy have actually revised their framework. They've condensed it down to a much shorter document and again, it's still freely available on the web and I've got the reference on the slides that follow and you're welcome to have a look at it. And again, it's condensed down but still has the levels of working for individuals, people, curriculum level or also within your institution. And also then it's helped me to think about activity that I want to engage in which is currently looking at the curriculum within our undergraduate program to try and think about how we can review our internationalization content and work with students and colleagues on that too. So in summary, I think that internationalization is really important for midwifery, it's become much more on our radar, it's great to have the opportunity to present for example at conference today, it's really important for us as professionals and it's something that I'm increasingly keen to engage in. I feel that the framework provides a really valuable opportunity, whether you're a midwife, an educator, a student, wherever you work, this framework can hopefully be useful for you to access and consider how you might want to enhance an existing internationalization. And the actual, the tool that I developed I think is hopefully a useful tool for people to potentially use to reflect on your engagement. And finally, in the UK, as in it, those other countries, of course, continuing professional development is very important to us as professional midwives. And in the UK it's been really useful to think about practice in terms of revalidation with the NMC and also for those of us that are educators potentially seeking the different levels of recognition within our Higher Education Academy. So potentially in your country you might want to think about how it might be useful for also your professional networks. So thank you very much indeed. And I'd really welcome any comments and questions or any engagements offline after the presentation and here are my contact details. And I'm going to now just click as well onto the final references section so that if you're interested in the materials and that I've included in my presentation that you can access them so they are freely available. So finally I'd just like to say thank you very much to the committee for the conference. I've really enjoyed taking part in the conference my first time this year. The support's been excellent and I encourage anyone else interested to apply to present and in future conferences. And thank you very much for listening to my presentation. Thank you so much Helen. It's been wonderful that we were able to make this opportunity available for everyone. And very, very interesting information. I was wondering... Thank you. So is your framework available? I'm afraid I'm probably not seeing it here on the list. It's, I've not actually published anything on it yet but I'm hoping to do that, it's a small tool but certainly the framework from the Higher Education Academy is and that's the one here. But I am hoping to publish on the framework that I've developed, yes. Well that would be great. You should let us know and we'll be able to share it on the VIDM website as well. Fantastic, thank you. Now I'd love to do that, that would be great because again, I think it is about, so these certainly, Higher Education Academy, it's a really accessible tool and I think it is, they certainly do try to make of it what you want to make of it. And I feel the questions are really helpful because they did make me really think about the different aspects within my role and as a professional that I could use to think about internationalization. We're increasingly looking at it within our curriculum, now within my current role. So it's great that there's a flexibility that it's a current framework. And again, the Higher Education Academy has lots of other resources around how different institutions and different professional groups have used it. So it's very much across the different professional disciplines. So again, people might also find further resources that might be of interest and value to them. So thank you very much. I will be taking that information and sharing it with my college here in Nova Scotia. I think that's something that we look at. Primarily, we look at supporting healthcare, internationally trained healthcare workers who've moved to Nova Scotia and Canada. And I think this would be very helpful for them in looking at our training and services that we make available and also for the individual to see where they need to be. Yeah, it's no great, absolutely. I think it does help. I think it poses questions of yourself, I think, as well as trying to embrace other forms of diversity and get to new different cultures and different workplaces. So great. Thank you. I hope that will be useful to you. I'm going to stop the recording now. Thank you very much.