 What we'll do now is, I'm going to now acknowledge our keynote speaker for today. So we have Mania Clementi. And Mania is another person who is absolutely passionate about the student voice. Mania, I've actually gone on and seen some of your YouTube videos as well, had a look at a few of those. And I can tell you're absolutely passionate about this as well. And there it comes very much across in your presentations. So Mania is her keynote today. We'll be about student agency and the concept of practice from Mania's from Harvard University. She researches, teaches, advises and acts as a consultant in sociology, in politics of higher education. Also involves significantly in European higher education and also the whole area of comparative higher education as well. Yeah, major studies around student governance and the student voice, student representation in education, which is a broader part of the Mania's research that she does. It's got over 120 publications, many keynotes. I noticed there's over 80 of those Mania. So you're a very busy person, but like all busy people, when they have important things to say, it's great Mania that you've allocated some of your precious time to SVA and for us to be able to hear from your experience and your insights. Cause I know you've been not only doing the formal research in this area, but you've been a great advocate for the student voice as well. So I'm really pleased about that. So Mania, I'm going to hand over to you now for your presentation, but just to say, thank you very much. Very pleased to be able to be here with us today. Thank you so much, Jeff, Shona, Piper for the invitation. Good morning to colleagues in Australia. I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the moment, coming into the evening hours of a Monday of teaching and things like that, but I'm really excited to be with you. The last time I was virtually in Australia was speaking at the National Union of Students Australia Convention. I think it was about a year ago, talking to student representatives. This time I know slightly different, more mixed audience. Piper was telling me, they're happy to have him, but I said, I could not say no to such a special organization as a student voice of Australia. Not many countries have the organization that would really bring together the practitioners and advocates for student voice. So I would very much want to support the work of these important organizations. And I'm delighted to join you today. My talk will be about student agency. Student agency, it's a concept that has been around for a while, but we are so directing it now in policy and also the scholars like myself are following with the conceptualization of this concept. So before I go into the official part of my lecture, I'm hoping that you can help me with a little exercise of keywords that you associate with hearing student agency. So I prepared for you a little poll everywhere. This is the least that I can do to interact with my audience. The chat function as Jeff said already is definitely open and I very much welcome as I speak of really the questions and the comments. But let's try first with this poll everywhere if we make it happen. So let me just see if that will work. So I'm going to be sharing and then in my busy desktop opening the chat. Here we go. So I'm hoping that you see that and I'll ask Jeff and Sean if they can confirm that you can actually see my poll everywhere. Yes, we can say that, Daniel, thank you. I would very much like to invite you if you could try to text to 22333 and then Mania Clemens 019 and then insert a keyword or a phrase that you associate with student agency. I'll give you one clue. Empowerment, student empowerment and anything else that comes to your mind. So I'm going to wait a little bit here for the responses they will be coming live if all that goes well and if you can pull out your mobile phones and give me a text or respond via website pool everywhere.com to Mania Clemens 019. I'll wait a little bit, hoping that our audience will be willing to interact with me just a little bit because I can't see you. So at least in this way, please. What words to associate with a concept student agency? I'm hoping it will work. If not, we'll move on. You know how it is in the pedagogical sense we have to be flexible. Anybody coming in? Thank you so much. I'll wait then for a couple of minutes. We have collaboration as an association with student agency and people are reinforcing the collaboration is growing a power, student power, empowerment again. Thank you. Thank you very much for being willing to engage with this kind of a warm up exercise before I go into the lecture. Advocacy, yes. Self-determination, thank you. One of the valuable competencies that we associate with student agency, absolutely. Partnership as well, yes. Partnership students as partners as well, right. Change, student agency as a towards, directed towards the change, responsibility to the students. Thank you, my goodness. We have a very competent group here with us, validation of students, yes. Representation of students, voice or vocal engagement, support. Thank you. Our word cloud is on fire now. Thank you so much. Let me see what else. Value, innovation as well. Collaboration is still big. Student action, student change, student power, authentic knowledge, ownership as well, right. Student ownership of their own universities if you give them agency. If you allow them to be agents rather than the objects of being passed on the knowledge. Accountability, validity, yes. Responsibility to students. So have students being responsible for their own learning, education pathways, but also for the higher education institutions of which they're part of or education institutions to which they belong. Thank you so much. Look at this, our cloud. I'll keep it on for just a matter of seeing students as experts as well. Exactly, an expert or so representative roles, students as expert roles, providing valuable insights into decision making within the higher education institutions. Wonderful, you're a wonderful audience. I don't see you, but thank you so much for being willing, your willingness to engage with me. Look at what we have. We have awareness. We have assertiveness as well. We have voice together. So lots of collaboration, partnership as well between students and other members of the academic community like Jeff has spoken earlier. Expression, support, learning, thank you. I'll stop it here and I will stop sharing and go now into my slides, but I'm keeping this one. I'll send to my colleagues at the Student Voice Australia just to remember this one. Thank you so much. Revolutionary, somebody mentioned exactly. Student agency can be as well enacted for revolutionary purposes when really big changes, social transformations are necessary. Thank you so much. I'm stopping this part. I'm going now into the official part of the lecture with my PowerPoint presentation. Let me just try to set everything up. I haven't been on Zoom for a while. Thank goodness. We are back in person here at Harvard. So here we go. And I'm going to try to do it like this. I'll probably have to stop this one. The word cloud, which is completely full right now and will open up. Don't mind my busy desktop. There you go. And just a moment, I have to start sharing once more because I think I posted before. There we go. There we go. So we are starting. I'm putting into the PowerPoint presentation so that you will have it easier. I'll try to do with you about 45 minutes lecture with some intermissions and via the chat function. I'm sorry, I can't interact that much more because webinar has a more limited possibilities of interacting with the audience. So I'm trying really to introduce the concept of student agency as link to student voice can offer a more overarching framework of what we know under this term and kind of bringing kind of umbrella conceptual framework to our discussion on student voice. So the thesis that I'll put forward today to you is that to understand and to foster student experiences and student outcomes in higher education, we need to understand and develop not student satisfaction with your kind of earlier phases of that was promoted and measured more in the consumerist terms, not even nearly student engagement, but really student agency defined as students capabilities to navigate, influence and take responsibility for their learning and education pathways and the ecosystem, educational ecosystem of which they are part of. And if you're wondering, so where the student voice come in this is really this part on influencing, right? One is to navigate to understand how education institutions of which they are part really work and to find their ways around them. The other one is voicing the concerns, asserting themselves as some people put into the cloud and trying to influence and then taking the responsibility not just for their own learning and education, but also for the institutions of which they're part of. So this is the thesis that I will be going forward. This is the overview of my lecture for today. I'll start with a policy context. I will try to define what is student agency and then I'll look really into the two aspects of student agency which are both interrelated. One is student agency for self-formation and the other one is student agency for institutional and social changes more what we associate with voice. But the voice is also in the self-formation part. And then in each of them, I will engage you in a discussion in how high education structures or education structures can help develop or strengthen student agency for the purposes of self-formation or for the purposes of institutional social change. So this is the part of the discussion and I will be inviting you in the chat function and I hope you will be with me. The sources here are the forthcoming chapter in the research handbook when student experiences in high education which colleagues from, I think from Australia, New Zealand are Chi Baik and Elakahu are editing and there I'm proposing a theory on student agency in high education and some other works that I have done a forthcoming chapter as well introducing the theory of student impact in high education which isn't completely finished yet. So I'm not putting it into my sources yet but it's something in the right thing because it will be done in the next couple of weeks. So this is where I'm going in chat as we go please feel free to add comments and suggestions and questions and I will leave time at the end and in the intermissions to kind of engage with those questions already. So let's start with the policy context. In the policies, I would say that student agencies emerging as one of the foundational concepts at least OECD has forefronted it more clearly than any other international organization I have seen. In fact, they have put it at the forefront of the OECD learning compass 2030 claiming that it's rooted in the principle that students have the ability and the will to positively influence their own lives and the world around them. So really very much kind of showing the basic principles of student agency and then they find it as the capacity of individuals to set goals, reflect and act responsibly to affect change. This concept is informed by the progressive educational philosophy that argued that the purpose of education is also to prepare individuals to become active and agentic individuals, agentic within the communities of which they're part of, agentic with the community members with whom they share the common spaces and that those are the kind of key principles that enable functioning democratic societies, functional cultural spaces and also free open market economies. So it's very much and OECD puts it like this that student agency is about acting rather than being acted upon, shaping rather than being shaped and making responsible decisions and choices rather than accepting those determined by the others. So this is the new policy context developed in 2019 and in a way researchers we are kind of catching up. There were several studies already that have introduced student agency concept before in the scholarly work but no kind of a comprehensive framework and this is what I'm trying to fit in the gap or fill in the gap as well conceptually and hopefully also do empirical studies following on the basis of that. So from the policy context I'm moving into the definition. And basically I gave you the earlier definition really identify student agency as capabilities of students, right? We said not to navigate, to influence and take responsibility for their own learning and for the education ecosystems of which they're part of. But student agency, the way that I conceived here is premised on student-agentic opportunities which are external to the student and are part of the structures of which they're part of and the agendic orientations and those are internal to the students. I'm very much linked to the students' motivations, dispositions, the will to act as also OECD has put it. And in a very disconceptual model of student agency I try to explain it as a double conversion. One part of the conversion is where the student's agendic orientations in interaction with the structures and the processes of which they're part of develop into a set of valuable capabilities. And this set of valuable capabilities comprise student agency. It's all very theoretical in the moment but I'll just give you that and then we'll try to bring it more back to where we started with a word cloud that is more useful for the practice. So the conversion students as their agendic orientations related to their backgrounds, related to their dispositions to actions and translation of those into the valuable capabilities. And then the second conversion is really conversion of the agendic capabilities that students have developed into the students' experiences and student outcomes in again, engagement with the structures and processes. I'll leave it at that. All that is explained in that chapter on the theory student agency but I'm not going to go further into the heavy theoretical work. Try to move a little bit beyond that. And maybe we think about the instrumental value of student agency. We of course go back to the literature that shows that the more agency students are afforded in higher education, the better learning outcomes and less likely to drop out from higher education they are. And they have been empirical research, there has been empirical research supporting that proposition. And then there is intrinsic value of student agency. And that is that if students have this agency we help them strengthen agendic capabilities. We are actually fulfilling that mission of preparing them to become agendic individuals also beyond the education institutions of which they're part of. And those agendic individuals as mentioned earlier are central to the functioning political democracies, cultural spaces, all open market economies and their local communities of which they're part again acting with other members of local communities. We don't want to, I don't want to with a student agency kind of a signal individualism. It's not, it's a lot, it is about partnership. It is about collaboration as you have highlighted before in the World Cloud. And then the second part of this intrinsic value of student agency suggests that if institutions afford student agendic opportunities they become sites of citizenship and civic involvement themselves. And in that way enable students education of students for active citizenship and development of the civic competences through action not through just courses teaching them what civic competence should be and what civic participation means but actually institutions themselves behaving as sites of citizenship behaving as real communities where all of the members all of the internal constituencies are members of these communities in partnership and in collaborations and in joint responsibility for the wellbeing of that education community and of the institution that they're part of. So this is the part of the intrinsic and the instrumental value of student agency. Now I'm moving into the part where I discuss student agency for self-formation. As I discussed earlier kind of differentiated into two different segments both interrelated but still conceptually slightly more distinct. And one is enactment of student agency for the purposes of self-formation. Here I go with Simon Marginsson a fellow Australian now in Oxford and the director of the Center for Global Higher Education proposition that we should view really high education as a student self-formation. And here I look into the opportunities a genetic opportunities and a genetic dispositions that allow students to develop capabilities that will foster their self-formation. And the list that you see here is really the collection from the literature educational research mostly of the valuable capabilities that researchers have brought together to help students pursue that self-formation. And I'm sure with the audience that is there given your backgrounds either in the student development or student engagement offices or fellow students this will probably not be new I'll just kind of try to bring them all together into one roof as a valuable capabilities kind of a set of capabilities comprising student agency for self-formation. Bandura in 2005 article has nicely collected them highlighting intentionality, self-direction, forethought, setting goals, anticipating likely outcomes of actions, self-regulation, cementment, developing goals, developing strategies, assessing strategies based on the outcomes and then another circle starting again with the new goals, new strategies. And personal development planning is one of the concrete actions which I think probably and I will I hope you will be telling me in the chat if that's something that you do in Australia as well but it's very much practiced in Britain less I would say in the United States but where I think all good educators should help students to do is within their own courses I try to help students to be self-regulated in the sense to set their personal learning goals in my course and develop their own study strategies and I need to help them as educated to develop own strategies in order to kind of bring and reflect on those strategies in order to stimulate their self-regulation and thus learning outcomes. Self-authorship and self-awareness, self-determination as colleagues have mentioned before as well in the word cloud, self-advocacy. So kind of a sense that you can succeed as Bandura puts it really nicely unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions. They have little incentive to act, to even try right or to persevere in the face of difficulties. I'm adding here mental wellbeing which hasn't been much discussed yet as a capability really. It is often linked to the concept of grit, the persistence, kind of a progress mindset or growth mindset but mental wellbeing especially after COVID it's also one of those capabilities that is important for self-formation for actually enabling students to act in order to develop their learning outcomes and so on. So I added this one here. So this is just, I would put them, this is kind of a set of capabilities that I would associate with student agency. A student agency that then when they enact students, these capabilities would help them towards achieving the outcomes, learning outcomes or personal learning goals or professional learning goals that they have set for themselves. So here I come now into a, hopefully a little bit of a chat discussion. So I already see there is a chat going on so a little bit stop because I'm hoping that we can discuss from your context how, through what kind of a services or what kind of a measures or practices your institutions are helping students develop those competencies or those capabilities I have discussed earlier that scholarship shows us are helpful for students to self-form or develop their, achieve their learning goals. So I'm going to stop here. I'll go into the escape and stop sharing so that I can go into the chat and see if there are questions in the chat first of all but hoping as well that people will be willing to bring into the chat some examples of how your institutions or the offices that you work in help students develop student agency, self-determination, self-regulation. Do you have a specific, do you practice personal development goals and students preparing personal development goals identifying those or some other processes? So let's see nothing yet. So I'm going to, you know, like I do with my students pause a little bit here. I was a kind of a conceptual, big conceptual junk on trying to understand student agency for the purposes of self-formation before we go into discussion of student, enacting student agency for the purposes of institutional social change. Okay. So let's see. There's a couple coming in now, yeah. Thank you. I am beginning a rapid loss of water and see student as partner program, CMB 063 is giving here to me. And I would love to hear it explanation how this works. If you could just give me a couple of more words, what does that mean? Is it training students for different roles within the institutions that you expert roles or something else? Student representatives working with academics definitely strengthens certain capabilities of them to assert their voice and give them the spaces, right? So mentoring programs. Shauna, thank you, yes. Mentoring programs, would that be student peer mentors or would that be academics or staff mentoring students in terms of how to navigate higher education environments? Okay, Juliana is saying here, students running workshop of topical issues, sustainability issues. Knowledge is always empowering, right? The more knowledge it is, the more the sense of self-efficacy can come in that students feel that they can actually succeed in the environment. Let me just see now. Okay, it is the whole training and interacting with other people within this program as students. Okay, so it's a, all right. So it's a kind of underlying principle. Thank you so much for Christina for explaining this. So students as partners program is kind of a whole training of interacting with students and engaging students, right? Within the program. Thank you. Training and induction of newly elected student representatives with additional strategic planning to assist scaffold them planning out the entire term. So goal setting, strategy, developing definitely, strengthening their individual capabilities but also organizational as a student union or the group, collective or student representatives. Thank you, student staff partnership projects, collaboration and problem solving in teams for continuous improvement. Really nice as well. Again, passing on some of those valuable competencies of planning, strategizing, evaluating your actions. Thank you. Thank you so much everybody for pitching in as well. I am known for doing inductive lectures. I don't like to kind of lecture. This is a special context we are on Zoom webinar but I like to as much as capture the knowledge which is in the group in the audience and this audience has ample of it. So let us capitalize on that as well. Suzanne is speaking about student ambassadors with areas of responsibility, academic integrity, exactly. So they're placing the position. They're offered kind of structural opportunities, a genetic opportunities to act as ambassadors in different issues. For example, academic integrity. We have them as well. We have an honor council here at Harvard where students are real partners to the staff. So it's 50% students, 50% staff, all of with the same voting rights or decision rights in that body. Peer mentoring, yes, okay. And post-graduation is sharing peer mentoring as wonderful as we have peer advising program. Puffs are called here as well at Harvard where the senior students or students in upper classes are serving as peer advisor to the younger students, basically helping them navigate the space, right? Understand how this strange institution, complex institution works and how they can find their way around and understand how to be a student and succeed a student in this institution. Choice and assessment topic to align with interest and interjection. Darcy, thank you very much, Darcy Taylor. Thank you. This is very much of allowing students agency within the courses, right? In the course curriculum, allowing some flexibility, some choice aligned with their own interests because that will be more motivational for them because, and then they can link as well what it is in the course to other areas of their interest. Wonderful. So this is definitely agency for self-formation, okay? Using current students to MC events, MC events, sorry. And as presenters, rather than, aha! All right, so really, really using students as well in the full capacity as presenters as well on an equal role rather than just the audience, right? That is, so they are coordinated like Shona is with Jeff today. Both are in the coordinating role of this event rather than just students always being the audience on the receiving end. Student governance framework, we are moving in there. So some of those practices will be repeating itself when we move into student agency really for the institution change and social change more directly student voice, but I'm going to mention them nevertheless. So Brie Glasbergen is discussing student governance framework, assisting students to represent different groups within the student ecosystem. Student representatives also need training, right? They also need capacity building. They also need to strengthen their capabilities in order to be able to represent students fairly and efficiently and professionally and really exercise the voice and the powers and the authority that was vested to them through the election. So wonderful. So they have the trainings to run meetings, prepare agenda, creative events, all very much empowering and all helping them build the capabilities strengthening their agency. Thank you, Brie, for describing this. Fiona McCourt as well from New Zealand. Hello, Kia ora Fiona. Code for learner well-being and safety, I like that. And then there is one outcome of the code, is learner voice, which means that theory providers have to partner with learners to ensure their voices are heard across the organizations. This is then regulated monitored by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Very interesting. So really formalized way, formalized code for the learner voices involved inside the education institutions. And I like the code for learner well-being because having a voice really does contribute to the well-being being heard, having agency rather than only being told what to do or how did the OECD people say rather than just being acted upon rather than acting, right? Really nice and regulated to the point of the being monitored by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. I'll check this out. It's really interesting. If you have a link, Fiona, please put it in. It's going to be easier to find those regulations. Yes, Juliana, since a simple measure as having students sit in the meetings is empowering not only because they have a voice but also to kind of learn the meeting dynamics and vote on the matters as full partners, not just the observers, yes. Again, Osama is highlighting students as partners programs, students as sounding boards, as influencer decision makers and co-creators. So really empowered in all of those kind of same rights as other decision makers as true partners. Okay, we have a lot of things. Okay, let me settle. Lastly, and then we'll move more. There are already instances here with the student voice but then I'll go into the student agency for the purposes of institutional reform, decision making and some social transformations if needed. Okay, student as partners program as well, students advisory group, meeting students and academics, meeting quarterly to workshop solutions to challenges experience, how wonderful. And then students come as their cohort to about 5,000 students. So really students have the responsibility to seek to aggregate student grievances or interest and then be able to floor them and discuss in this quarterly workshop with the academics on the challenges and trying to find the solutions. A true partnership indeed. Thank you, Simon. And then we have the student vendor embedding student intents and casuals into non-academic projects and programs to create like for like uplift in understanding between staff and students. Interesting. So this is a kind of student service roles, right? As intents in different types of the programs as well and create and again in a full partnership. Here students step in into the kind of questions of programming and operations, right? That's how I understand it. And we, this is the academic quality agency for the University of New Zealand. Thank you for introducing yourself. Shilak Nathere as well. Work with national students associations and universities to develop capability for new students coming into academic decision-making roles. So again, training the newcomers, helping them pass institutional memory from the previous ones so that they can embrace and that they are prepared for the roles that they have acquired. Wonderful. Student voice summit. I think I might have spoken in that one in New Zealand. I've been in a lot of events as Jeff has said recently during the Zoom, I traveled a lot virtually. And Mikael, collaborative peer-facilitated mentorship to guide and empower young students towards academic integrity. Very interesting. Very interesting. And here is really academic integrity. It's an important aspect of our academic enterprise. And here it's really empowering young students to embrace it and to know how to cope and using peer-facilitated mentors, helping them. So it's a lot in kind of a prevention as well rather than sanction, right? And in this way, empowering students. Wonderful. And Fiona, thank you so much for the links. We'll check that later. Thank you so much for this very interesting practices and kind of connecting me to your worlds and your context so that I can understand in which way student agency is manifested and enacted in your context. I'll now continue with my second and final part of presentation where I'm moving into the student agency for the purposes of just a moment. I need to a little bit clear my business screen so that I can, yeah, there we go. So I'm moving here now into the student agency for institutional social change. So the first time, the first part that I try to kind of say that students need, the student agency has to be strengthened so that they can fully develop their learning outcomes that they can kind of achieve that self-formation which should be the objective of each higher education institution. And that is presuming that when students come into the education environments in the universities and other type of higher education institutions or education type of institutions, they don't yet have all of the skills understanding how to study skills or how to navigate those spaces, what's possible, how to read the invisible curriculum, how to understand the norms or behaviors, how to be a student in those spaces. And this is where programs such as partnership program or peer mentoring program can help them or training or advising programs within different offices. And this is where important role is played as well by student representatives who work with the academics and others to kind of help develop programs that will help each student to find a way to navigate the spaces, to find a way of how to express their voice, their concerns either through the student representation or directly and be able to be attentive as well within the curriculum, within the courses through flexibility as one of the colleagues said, allowing options in terms of assignments that will allow the student to follow the interest. So this is one aspect. The other aspect student agency I want to highlight is really enactment of student agency for purposes of institution social change. And here I'm going more straightforward into the discussion of student voice. And we have ample literature ready on student voice and student as partners. We have also journal on student as partners in higher education. This is a kind of a recent development within the last decade, but very much taking front not only within the Anglo-Saxon world, but it's going to other parts of the world as well. Sometimes with a slightly different emphasis in the Latin American context would be still about student representation, student activism, student solidarity rather than the concept of student as partners. In the Asian context, often it has to find some kind of a consensus or middle ground with the Confucian ideas about respectful authority and for the elderly and has to find a way there. But it is the concept, these are the concepts and the literature that is becoming global as well. And what this scholarship affirms is the positions from the agency theorist and the prominent agency theorist like Margaret Archer and Giddens, that it's not only that higher education structure for education structures and processes have effects on agents, in our case students and there are also effects from them and it is due to the structures and processes that students learn and professional develop and so on. But in fact that agents, in our case students and learners as agents can also have effects on the processes and the structures of higher education. So within their learning and education ecosystems. So that they also have agency. Within the sociology of higher education we have several domains of study. And one of the largest one is the one on the effects of college and students, it's called the college impact on students. And what is research there is everything from student engagement and how that is helpful to prevent the dropouts and how a student engagement is helpful, student engagement in education and the purpose of activities is helpful for the students learning outcomes about personal development and what kind of activities help aid about the belonging, all of that is captured within that domain. But what the research largely feels technology is that students also have agency in the context of higher education, also have effects on other students and on their institutions. And this is where the issue of student voice comes into the play and really kind of broader discussion of student impact on higher education. So when we think about the capabilities needed for students to have the voice for institution social change, we can think about the same or similar set of capabilities we have discussed earlier for the self-formation, the forethought, intentionality, self-regulation, self-efficacy sense, sense that the change is possible. So all of those are relevant here as well, but this time enacted for the purposes of institutional change or if you want to go beyond that social transformation rather than for the purposes of self-formation. And again, the importance of agentic orientations and agentic opportunities is still there. It still means that students have to have a will and motivation to act and that they have to be opportunities for them within the structures, either opportunities exist already or they push for the opportunities to present themselves so that they can have institutional and social change. The programs that you have mentioned before students as part of the program, the New Zealandish example of very formalized rules for the learner voice, those are the agentic opportunities derived from the environment that I speak about. Sometimes they do not exist and this is where students have to become agents for the changes and claim those spaces and enact those changes that bring about agentic opportunities for them to express their voice. I'm going to go a little bit more theoretical here to discuss, well, I'm sorry, I should be actually in the presentation mode so that you can see it better. So I have this, another conceptual framework and this is the student impact model in higher education which really explains how student agency is enacted towards student impact on higher education. And this one has five proposition. I'm sure all of them very familiar to you just judging from the previous input in the chat. And the first proposition is that students in a variety of roles on campus within their educational ecosystem can directly and purposefully influence these higher education ecosystems. And these that I call high impact roles or the roles for direct student effects on their higher education ecosystems exist within student representation on campus employment or voluntary services. In the examples you have mentioned before we have student interns program. We had student peer mentorship programs. They were somebody mentioned as well students that are part of the academic and integrity committees. Those all are high impact, potentially high impact roles of the students. Leadership roles within student groups and organizations. Again, present opportunities for those students to have effects on other students and together collectively shape the student life or campus life within the institution that they are part of. Activism is also a possible high student impact role. I don't know the relationship in Australia, New Zealand to activism in the US from the revolutionary sixties and the protests and the more adversity of the institutional leaders towards activism. I think we have more in the recent years moved into the at least narrative of student of university leaders embracing student activism as a form of civic engagement. So it's a kind of a change in the narrative. I think the conditions still are as long as it is nonviolent so peaceful protest but it's an interesting change in the at least the frame make of the relationship that institutions have towards the activism rather than to prevent it and control it and see it as a kind of a deviant behavior now into more kind of embracing of student activism as a form of civic engagement. But that's the US example. I would be interested if you would be willing to share in the chat what are the kind of attitudes to activism in your context. So as I said, so there are campus roles potentially high impact campus roles that enable students and afford them with this this with authority and opportunities for having effects on other students and the institutions of their part of and the student impact occurs along a continuum. So different roles afford different potential degrees of impact some are more high impactful than the others and the same role affords different degrees of impact at different times. For example, student representation, student representative roles, elected student representative in principle at least according to the formal rules in most of our education institutions this should be high impact roles. But there are ways for institutional leaders to diminish the power of the students. And I mean, the tricks that can be performed are not informing the student representative properly even if they are invited to the meetings and have voting rights in the meetings not training the student representative properly. So they can be professional and impactful in their roles. I mean, there are ways that despite the authority vested in the student representation the power can be diminished if it's being manipulated as well. And of course, then we have a lot of systems where students do not have partnership type of engagement relationship within the student within the institutional governance. And that's that's a different story which is not the case in your context. So different types and sometimes the expert roles can have even more impact than the representation. And in some higher education system, especially the ones that I'm part of it's really engaging students as experts in different faculty committees. Nowadays the students come from the student representation but it hasn't always been like that. And it's not always the case for all of the committees. In some committees there is a call students can apply and then they are selected by the administrators or based on the competences that they can bring and the expertise that they can bring to the committee's decision. So it really very much depends on the arrangements of each institution. And then the fourth one is kind of obvious based on what we have discussed before that the institutional structures, the processes, the culture that is part of the institution can enable, empower or deter student impact opportunities. So there's a variation in the agentic opportunities that then allow students to enact agency for the purposes of institutional change. And then secondly, that there are certain agentic orientation that are important for students to enact agency towards institutional sense. And the ones that I highlight here are students having a sense of citizenship, having that sense like Fiona and Jeff said before that students are full members of the academic community that they are respected as members of the and affirmed as full members of academic community as full partners within the institutions that they are part of. The sense of belonging that students have to the institutions, the sense that this is my institution is also important. The sense of efficacy, as we have discussed before that the enactment of agency actually can bring about changes, that it's possible to change things if they put in effort and work collectively, for example. But also public service dispositions, right? Some students are simply not interested in engaging in this type of role. Some are very much career oriented and really just work towards getting the job afterwards. And some are more academically oriented and really devoted to the academic course or athletes or other extracurricular activities. So not necessarily the public service dispositions that would motivate them to join and take on the roles that have effects on changing the institutions or enacting the institution change or change beyond social transformation as well and activism beyond the campus itself. So it has to do with the agentic orientations as well. But some of those things, sense of citizenship, the community that is based on really fostering belonging of each of the students, sense of efficacy can be the ones that can act as motivators for students to actually take on the roles that are potentially impacted in this regard. And the fifth one, I will just kind of take one unlikely. I am not fully sure if it fits, but I just wanted to kind of add it as an after note. Before I spoke about the roles where students directly and purposefully seek those roles to have effects on their higher education institutions or education institutions, there are also students can also change or affect the structures and processes within institutions indirectly. And this is where the consumerism really comes in and not going to go much in it because this is not usually that I include in my, but I just want to kind of recognizing is it that students ask consumers through their expression of individual and collective preferences have effects on institutions. Again, in the US, we know of perverse examples that institutions are putting a lot of money into lazy rivers, the pools or the climbing walls because they believe that that will attract fee-paying students as well who care about those amenities in the colleges that they join. So this is the indirect effect that students can also have on higher education institutions. But in this talk, I really want to focus on the other ones, on the representation on the paid and voluntary service roles on the leadership roles that students have with their student groups and organizations and potentially activism, which where there are more purposeful direct effects that students can have on institutional changes. So this is pretty much what I have. I am going to either engage you into the more examples of those structures that influence student agency for institutional change, but many of those you have already said or I'm ready to open up this talk for further questions and your input. And I have already, I'm opening the chat now, so I'm going to stop sharing. My next slide is really just thanking you. But I'm opening now, hopefully for some questions, comments from your side. Again, sorry, I can't hear you speak, but I hope that you can help me with the chat function. And I have Jeff and Shona here as well, hoping to contribute as well. Thank you. Okay, Manu, look, thank you very much for that. That was a fantastic insight into agency and agentic behavior from students. As you've said, we've opened it up now for questions comments, please type in there any questions or comments that you've got. But Manu, I'm going to start off just while people are starting to put things in there. And really just a very practical question because with students, we know that many of them are quite busy. I think you probably sort of indicated that as well. So how do you, how does an institution facilitate, promote, encourage, you know, students being agentic when the sort of students probably, you know, they might have part-time work. They might have some, many might have families or other responsibilities. How do we actually help them be, be agentic within the, within an institution? Jeff, this is an excellent question. And we have Fiona McCourt is basically asking along the similar lines. And it's really the question of quality and access to high impact rules, right? It is, because students, as you rightly pointed out, they have to economize their choices that they're making on how they're spending time within their higher education education institutions. And often that kind of economizing decisions involved, am I going to take on a paying job because I have to? Which helps with my living. It's a kind of existential question. And how much time do I still have left for pursuing public service roles, which effectively those high impact roles are. And what I see increasingly across institutions in the United States, but also in Europe is some form of stipend for student representatives and students who are taking roles as experts in the various task forces within high education institutions just to ensure that we are not excluding out of those roles low income students who depend on labor to support themselves and all their families during the time of the study and kind of really create equality in access to the public service roles across different student populations. So, and this is not, it's a question, you know, there's no easy formula, but it's either a form of assignment or kind of hourly compensation for this role that is becoming much more of practice. I see it in the European context. It is the student unions who tend to take on these roles that take care of some kind of compensation. And this is not full salaries. This is not like UK where they have a paid sabbatical student officers. It's usually small hourly stipends, but just helping them if you, either you have to work for hourly wage in some kind of job or you're contributing in the different discussions. So it's a kind of some sort of compensation. In the US, of course, we have residential colleges and residential colleges create a lot of campus jobs. So variety of roles, especially kind of being interns in women's center or student sustainability officers or honor council officers would be compensated. It would be just another form of student campus jobs. Those are usually hourly, again, hourly wages or a stipend, a fixed stipend, I don't know, $500 for the entire year would be then a compensation for playing this role. Because otherwise, the situation you pointed very well, it is inequality in access to the public service roles for those who have to work while they're studying. And this is pretty much majority of our student population, isn't it? So it's hardly in any kind of system that we no longer have. I mean, most of the students are working one way or another, some more than the other, but this is how we would then ensure the equality in access to public service roles, basically. Public service roles that are valuable, engaging students in the roles that are then valuable as well for the advancement of the university in the sense of joint decisions, as colleagues have discussed before where academics and students come together to address the challenges that students have identified within their community and so on. So this is something that I would be interested in how you are dealing with that question as well in Australia, whether stipends or some compensation is common or not at all, that is the case. So if somebody is willing to, Shona is pitching here in as well. Could this be the case of getting higher education up to the same standards of other industries in healthcare? It is increasingly required in policy that consumers are compensated for their involvement in research, for example, yes, particularly if they participate in co-design of research services in progress. This is one example, and yes, I would say that some compensation for, because I have a student right now in my class who is doing a project on unpaid labour among students as well, and again pointing especially to the difficult decisions among the low income students who have to work while studying and not choosing public service roles which all of those roles are because of their existential issue of needing to earn money if those roles are uncompensated. Yes. Yes, I think on their money there's a couple of comments. Yeah, the people have put down about the paid, non-paid. Also, I think it's interesting and perhaps you could let us know about your insights into this. Do you think there's any difference in the attitude of students if they're paid or not paid in terms of how they perceive either the importance of their agency or the impact that they're able to have if they're in a paid versus a non-paid relationship with the university? It's also a very interesting question whether it changes in some sense. I think that some sort of compensation, it is affirming that their contribution is valuable and valued by other members and they don't feel exploited for free labor or unpaid labor contributing while they know that everyone else that is on the same committee is actually doing this as part of their job description. Whereas they would be coming in as volunteers. So it is this kind of affirmation of the fairness of being partner in that particular endeavor. And again, you know, that doesn't mean salary but it is some form of compensation. I mean, some institutions, this is Europeans only, are thinking about credit, course credit, especially service learning type of courses could give credit to students for public service roles on campus. So that could be an alternative possibility. So students, if they serve for one term, one semester in a public service role as members of the Students Affairs Committee, for example, or Honors Council Committee, that they receive for that course credit provided that they also offer some kind of reflection. Usually they would be a reflective paper attached to it. So it's not just having service but prompting students as well to reflect on that service role. That is, but usually a more common nowadays is becoming a sort of hourly compensation or a stipend for that role. So again, it's the question, I think, of affirmation and just being able to take time, right? Because they are split among many different opportunities, what to do while they're on campus. Some where they have to work for pay but also other extracurricular opportunities being part of the choir. So they actually have to balance their decisions on what to do. And I think compensation is helpful or course credit if that's a possibility. Okay, let me see now a little bit. Jeff, help me if you see something that I don't see. So we have covered the potential of the effects of compensation especially in tackling the inequalities in access to public service roles. And our staff often make comments about their workloads and being required just a moment. This is jumping a little bit. Oh, Mania, that was just a comment from me that our staff always say that they're being asked to do more for either the same remuneration or whatever. And I think we just need to think about our students in the same life. And I don't want to undermine I think that our staff are often overworked as well and kind of adding on the roles as well especially and we know that anything to do in terms of service to students in the student engagements tend to be challenging tasks and require a lot of time commitment and often emotional labor as well as part of those roles as well but in the same way students also kind of put in their time and their insights. Fiona is saying she hasn't seen a difference in attitude across paid and unpaid roles. Always very engaged. Fiona, I tend to agree with you on that because there's just students who have this kind of a public service disposition that try to give it the best and will give it the most. And I have worked so much in my life as a student rep. I was serving in various roles on various levels up to there being a secretary general of the European Students Union representing over a level in million of European students towards European Commission, the Parliament and other institutions. And I mean on a very kind of a limited salary if it was at that time but it was still paid but my executive committee they were all volunteers all fully and 100% engaged. And it's, I would say they will do it never the last they will do it but the question is who is choosing those roles and who can afford doing this role and whom we are missing among the students who are taking on the roles because they cannot afford to take on the roles. It is really the question of equality of access to the public service role but I agree with you those that are committed will work and well beyond what they are asked for because they're committed and they're doing it for the purpose, right? It gives them also the sense of having a purpose while being a student as well. And I guess Manja some of the other comments there around our regulatory frameworks and environment and that would vary I guess across different countries as well and also when it starts moving into like whether it's a work integrated learning activity or an internship or a sort of formal thing that's part of a course versus something which is done outside of the individual course and is more general rather than sort of course specific. So I guess that's partly what that comment is about although I wonder whether you also want to pick up on the one Kelly has put there which is really about at least I'm reading this Kelly and you can explain if I didn't get this right around the individual versus the collective. So is the agency around well I'm doing this because it's enhancing my agency as an individual and I'll be able to use this for other things I want to do later on versus I'm doing this as part of a larger group or part of a community that I belong to and that's actually why I'm doing this. Wonderful comment Kelly. I sometimes struggle with this kind of individualistic lingo or the narrative framing that especially a multi-sense capabilities approach might suggest. I'm trying to fight it and really emphasize the collective nature of engagement of students and enactment of student agency and the representation student representation would be a prime example of the awareness there's so little that one can achieve on one's own in that context but also if we talk about student self-formation learning is essentially a social process students learn not just from their teachers and by themselves but mostly learning happens within a classroom from their peers as well so as a kind of a social process collaborative learning is one of the most effective pedagogical method that one can enforce within the classroom peer-to-peer learning and creative opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and another highly impactful method of teaching so if there is a way that I can reframe it please send me a message but I do take your point that kind of a talking about the agency might kind of misleadingly emphasize the individualism or the persistence rather than attention to the collective pursuit that students are engaging in when they are pursuing institutional changes or the collective nature or social nature of the learning that happens within the classroom and students enacting agency in that context but thank you so much so I definitely want to drive home the message of student agency not supporting the individual endeavor but really enforcing students being part and equal members of a community and engaging with other members of that community so definitely going against the individualization because it simply doesn't work and even you know there's lots of talk about great persistence growth, mind and all of that and I reject it also on the purposes because first of all we are part of the social structures and also it's not just up on the individuals to achieve that it is really very much part of all the social structures in which we are that help students to develop those capabilities and create opportunities for students either to be agenting within the classroom with the flexibility options or to be agenting and as partners of their institutions pursuing institutional changes or finding solutions to the problems that they have identified so thank you so much for pointing this out because I really wanted to have a chance to clarify it but definitely relational community partnership narrative rather than individual narrative behind the student agency but I see where you come it could be easily seen because especially because I'm framing it very much on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach which is also taking for more individual individual Jeff can you help me a little bit to find I think there's yeah some people have put in some comments examples of things there but I will just perhaps Mania encourage you to give us your thoughts on the issue of the different voices that need to be heard because if we think about our student body our student body is very diverse so we have in all of our jurisdictions we have international and domestic students who are straight out of school versus students who have had a sort of a significant life experience we also have different cultural groups within our institution how do we facilitate or how do we encourage a diversity of voices and how do we avoid a situation where there might be some voices that for whatever reason appear to be a bit louder than other voices and that means that some voices don't get heard at all even though we might have great intentions we might say look we want to hear the student voice because it's something that we often think about here I'm just thinking about my university now but in any tertiary institution I'll have a diversity of voices what's your experience around that Jeff a difficult question I've seen student unions and student councils very much struggle with it as well because in principle they should be open in representing the interest of all of the student population and student population is becoming increasingly diverse as it should and this is a good thing but how do you capture all of these different voices and how do you bring them and how do you aggregate all of those different student interests and how do you send them and intermediate them to the institution it's a difficult question I've seen some examples where institutions have tried software instruments such as direct voice I think it was one of them was here in Australia as well so a lot of instead of even going through student representation of a fear that they might be bringing all of the voices they sometimes try to do this kind of direct democracy so with a kind of a short referendum type of polls on issues hoping that they will really kind of capture the interest of all of the community so this was one I think you'll have to look into the colleagues here in Australia I think it was Malibu and Trident how effective that direct voice was it would be really just kind of pulled on a certain new policy and checked in with the students so this is one way but I think that the owners really lies within the representative student associations with student unions and the councils to canvas broadly in their community to purposefully seek diversity among elected representatives and be mindful of seeking the representative that can represent the different the worst voices of students it's very difficult to do much more so I think that it is part of the training of the new elected representatives as well really looking into their own structures and seeing if they are doing enough of outreach as well among different representatives among the students so that they are bringing the candidates that can reflect the diversity of their student bodies and sometimes the student unions have caucuses for different subpopulation of students first generations, international and so on so this is one of the possibilities as well I can't help but noticing there was one comment here as well just going back to the compensation of students and somebody was suggesting that that might be a kind of a conflict of interest I'll just point out if we go back to the compensation not necessarily for the same compensation for the same roles there's really a question what kind of roles are you asking students to do if you want them to be part of the task force if deciding on important things everybody else is based you might consider compensation if you call students together for a town hall to discuss the curriculum development for the study program that you're part of you're not going to compensate on that if you're asking a student to be part of your evaluation committee part of the accreditation agency was going to compensate that particular student for the other members of the evaluation panels going into the institutions so it really depends on what role if the students are compensated through their union already and are on salary like in the UK you're not going to be compensating them because that's part of their job description to come and be speaking in the academic senate so again there is a difference in that regard we'll go into before we close and we go to the next panel which is already joining us is there anything else Geoff that you would like to point out for the final round? No I think you've done a fantastic job Manja look I just want to thank you for first of all giving us your insights and also hearing a little bit about your studies as well your research but also I think you've really generated exactly what you're about and that's about sharing our experiences and sharing our insights and actually asking lots of questions that's really what it's all about that's how we learned by asking lots of questions of each other and then finding out what other people are doing so we've recorded this we've captured all of the texts we've got some fantastic things from participants as well as well as obviously all your formal things that you did as part of your presentation so look we really appreciate your time here and as you can tell this is a group of very passionate people here today and this is something that we want to continue to grow in and with and I think having a sort of an international community as well is really important because as you're very aware things are different in different countries they are differently as well and that's how we learn from each other but you know everyone's committed to having that student voice and whether it's SVA, whether it's the other groups around the world I mean New Zealand colleagues have got some fantastic work that they're doing as well like here locally this is really important but it's really great so look on behalf of everyone we really appreciate your time