 A very good morning and warm welcome to all of you who've joined today. My name is Shivani and I'm joining from the lands of the Darug people. And with me today are my 21C student partner colleagues and Dr. Tai Peseta, who's the academic lead of the 21C project. And we're super glad to be here this morning. Before we dive into the keynote, it's so, so important that together we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land, our First Nations people. I acknowledge that the campuses of Western Sydney University lie on the unceded lands of the Darug, Daruwal, Iora and the Wiradjuri peoples. We acknowledge them as traditional custodians of those lands and pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging. We celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their ongoing cultures alongside their stewardship of the lands and waters of New South Wales. These lands were never ceded and this was and always will be Aboriginal country. Today, I am here with Dr. Tai Peseta, Lily Rose Saliba and Jackson Edwards. And although you see just us and we are here today presenting to you, you must know that we're a part of a larger, very fun and very special team of student curriculum partners at Western. There are more of us, undergrads and postgrads, trainee teachers, psychs, medicals and scientists, and our work builds on all of their work and the SCPs that have come before us too. Here at Western, we are student curriculum partners on an institutional project called 21C. 21C is one of those five-year strategic projects that ask some tough questions about the nature, scope, size, relevance of our curriculum and teaching for our 21st century world. And it has three parts, transforming teaching, transforming curriculum and innovating alternative credentials. And our work sits within the transforming curriculum stream with Tai. And we basically do two things. We co-create transdisciplinary curriculum with staff and external partners. And then we also co-create mechanisms to grow student staff partnership at our university. And both of these are enormous responsibilities. The 21C project has been going since 2017 and lots of people have worked on it over the years. So it's a pretty big project by student standards anyway. So over the past five years, we have had over 40 students from different degrees and stages of their university journey. Join us as SCPs, student partners from science, medicine, business, the humanities, all the way to education, law, psychology and social science. And some of us have been in our first years of undergrad degree, whilst others have transitioned to a PhD. But the thing that brings us all and has brought us all together is this, that when we look back at our university experiences, we realize that things could be better and that we have a role in contributing to making our experiences better. So that's the context of our student staff partnership work. What we're keen to do in this particular presentation today is a couple of things. We want to share with you our questions and puzzles about preparing students for student partnership, drawing on our experiences of being student partners. Then we really want to share what we discovered when we looked around at what other unis were doing in this preparation space. And then we want to share the things we have co-created at Western Sydney University to prepare students for student partnership. And that's where the gold of today's presentation lies. So let's not fiddle with while Rome burns. So I'll hand over to Lily Rose. Thanks, Shivani, we don't want to pretend that we've cracked some magical formula about preparing students for partnership. But what we do want is for you to think critically along with us for the next 15 or seven that we've got left. So when we started off as student partners, there were some ideas that we had to confront about the work. And we're going to discuss four of those ideas as a way of thinking about the question of preparation. The first one is this, shifting from them being the university and staff versus us, us being the students, to transitioning to we, being us together. When you first come into partnership work, it might look a little something like this. Students are grouped together on one side, staff are grouped together on the other side. And when the university invites us into partnership, it all feels a little bit weird and strange. But over time, partnership shifts the dynamic to something a little more like this. It's staff and students alongside each other. And as Ty wisely says, in partnership, we teach each other our version of the university. Quite often, staff underestimate just how strange and weird this is for students, but they can overestimate the effects of being invited into partnership in one context, whilst all the other contexts remain mostly transactional. And so that then brings us to our second point. Partnership challenges how we come into the university. We come into the university ready to be transactional, because that's how we've learned to succeed in our studies. When we come into partnership, though, we're no longer being told what to do. We're expected to bring our A game and to take initiative to be curious, to explore, to learn, to ask questions, to not assume the certainty of our positions and to collaborate rather than to compete. Again, let us just underscore how odd this might be for many students. Here's our third idea. One of the most difficult questions to answer might actually sound like one of the simplest. How do we begin to define the role of a student partner? What is it exactly that student partners do? And how do we describe a role to students that they can't feasibly see? We're not just called in to provide feedback, although that's important too, but it might seem a little transactional now. In partnership, we're actually given a seat at the table to work alongside staff to create solutions, to create incredible content and resources, concepts to encourage staff and ultimately to try and improve the university experience. It's because of our curriculum partnership that we've been able to engage with the educational politics of our university more than we ever would have in our lives as regular students just going to class and studying. And there's a notable shift that happens there. You move from being a student to being a student partner. Because of this transition, our ideas about being a student expand. And importantly, our ideas about who staff are and what they do, they also expand. And now we know a lot more about the contexts and the conditions that our teachers work in as they make decisions about our learning. And we've come to recognize that it's a lot. In our curriculum partnership with staff, we've learned just how much we rely on each other for education to be the transformational experience that universities promise. If anything, we've also learned just how relational partnership is and how more than anything, this conversation is an ongoing one. The fourth interesting thing is this interplay between experience and expertise. And it's something that we talk quite a lot about within our team. We know that staff are interested in how we experience our learning. We know that when we co-create curriculum alongside staff that we have expertise that they might not have, whether that be technical, designed focused or practical skills. But we also quickly confront the limits of our own expertise as students. Students aren't really experienced navigators of the university. Many of us don't have an institutional gaze. As students, it's quite hard to think and operate across layers of the university. We don't always understand what goes on for academics as they teach us. So when we use the word expertise, we do so in inverted commas and with caution. And that's in part because we recognize that expertise is earned. It has status, it's peer reviewed, and it's often conferred by others in a community. Expertise is amenable to challenge. And typically it's also paid for. So for us to use the word expertise, we try and be intentional and precise. And so that leads us to the big question. How do you prepare students for work that looks like this? Naturally, we started by looking around at what other Australian unis were doing in this space and here's a snapshot of what we found. So I'm going to hand over to my colleague Jackson now to take us through that. Thanks for that, Lily Rose. Anyone who looks into this space will see that there's a lot going on. We've had a look at how other unis are involving their students to enter partnership and found a myriad of useful ideas and effective strategies. At the University of Queensland, student partners can access professional development and networking opportunities. And student feedback is fed back into future iterations of the student staff partnership initiatives. They also have the student fellows program and the supporting student reps program both rated highly by the student participants. Curtin University has a set of values it inducts into student partners, such as inclusivity, shared values and understandings, consultation, recognition, and building knowledge. They have also created several initiatives across the country, like consultative communities, peer support, and contribution to focus groups. Although it's not clear to us how students prepared for this work. At Victoria University in Melbourne, there are a network of meetings and roundtable discussions to engage their students and stakeholders with ambassador programs, mentoring, and learning hubs. So while there's a lot going on in terms of professional development, networking opportunities, and guiding principles, we don't get a sense of what these do to prepare students for a partnership approach. Here's what we're doing at Western Sydney. We've created and developed the student staff partnership curiosity bot to introduce students to the partnership mindset, to guide them as they shift for being just a student to a student partner ready to take a partnership approach. So let's start with this idea of a partnership mindset. The partnership mindset is a work in progress. It's been our attempt to make sense of the co-creation work we've been doing together over the past five years and to consider what it takes to prepare new students for the work of partnership. We've been playing with this notion of curiosity. What helps our work get started is being curious about how our partners see the work and the partnership itself. Why do they see it that way? What can they see that I can't? Being curious causes you to pause, reflect, and to ask rather than to brush in with your own views or expertise. It's about starting from a position of interest, humility, and generosity. We think partnership, sorry, we think purpose is an important commitment too. It's about partners having a chance to find their why, being intentional about their decisions, and then communicating them. You're asking yourself, how do others in this partnership matter to me? This part is underpinned by ideas of trust and significance. To be in partnership with someone else, you're inviting them to matter to you. The co-creation part is also pretty critical. It's where things get done. This is the chance to get your hands dirty and make creative and meaningful things together. This process is often messy, frenzied, and uneven, but because you matter to each other, you trust that things will resolve smoothly. Paying attention to transformation is essential as well. Noticing what's changed about how you see yourself and your capacities is so important to the partnership mindset. Next up is recreation. From our perspective, once you have a good experience of partnership, you want more of it. Partnership begets partnership, and that recreates the boundaries of what's possible within the university. And finally, legacy. Now, this includes both the big and small L legacy. The capital L is the question of impact, the critical threshold between what you do and the change that it generates for others. Small L legacy focuses on the artifacts and the assets that result from the partnership. These artifacts will make their way up, down, and across the university, quietly lodging themselves in the consciousness of others. So that's our working model for a partnership mindset. For us, this mindset has been so important to our curriculum co-creation efforts. We've definitely realized that there is a challenge ahead in supporting the new student partners to engage with the partnership mindset. Now, I'll gladly hand things over to Ty to finish us up. Hi, folks. Here's a snapshot of our Curiosity pod. This is a piece of curriculum that sits within our university's online learning management system. It's 15 to 30 hours of student volume of learning. And when students finish it, they get a digital badge or a credential. The Curiosity pod is available to any student who wants to take it. And it's also embedded in a subject, a subject that we call... We are the university students co-creating change. So if a student is already enrolled in that subject, they will also do the Curiosity pod as a matter of their course of learning through that subject. Or if a student has done the Curiosity pod and wants to later enroll in the subject, then their digital badge earns them prior learning. So what we're trying to do in this Curiosity pod is really start a conversation about the cultivation of a partnership mindset. And it's an important thing to remember that it's the start of the conversation. It's not all of the conversation and it's certainly not the end of the conversation and nor is it the whole process. The Curiosity pod is structured in three modules. And it's a very Western focused, as you might imagine, Curiosity pod. Because we're trying to induct students into what student-staff partnership looks like at Western. So we have discover, explore and partner. And students have access to an array of resources, videos, readings, and they contribute their learning to a collective and public student-staff partnership journal which is embedded in the Curiosity pod. And it's the accumulation of those student reflections that constitute the work they do to complete the Curiosity pod. It's important to note, I think, from our perspective that the Curiosity pod can sit on its own. It can be an unbundled piece of curriculum. And it can be used for other initiatives in the university to underscore their preparation. But it also integrates into a more in-depth partnership process. And we need both those things for a coherent and convincing narrative for students and staff. So it's a way for us to think about how to design institutional mechanisms that allow partnership to grow. But that growth needs to happen without us. We can't be everywhere. But so we need to provide the things that allow the university to kind of anchor their partnership practices off. And while we've made the Curiosity pod, we are also in the process of creating partnership that kind of moves along step two and step three here, as you see. Just a couple of weeks ago, we launched a new initiative called the Partnership Exchange Hub. And it's an opportunity that allows more staff and more students to engage in a supported partnership process. We funded seven projects, so not a huge number. And we gave out 20 scholarships to students to partner on those projects. And our team, my colleagues here with me today, the team of people who were supporting the staff and students in those projects to work in partnership. And in the PX Hub, the Curiosity pod that we've just talked about is the students' preparation. It's important to note that we've also made something for staff because preparing staff for partnership is also an important component of students and staff kind of partnering together well. And it's the start for us of encouraging new student partners to engage with this idea of a partnership mindset. And so those students are about to start that Curiosity pod. And that will generate a lot of questions for us about the adequacy of the Curiosity pod to prepare students for partnership as those teams proceed through those projects. But I'm coming up to the end now, and I just want to share just one lesson, I think, that we've learned as a team and thinking about this question of partnership and preparation. And it's this, the act of making curriculum with others is what has prepared us for partnership. It's not only the Curiosity pod that we've made together, it's the range of other curriculum co-creation that we've done over the past four years. In other words, what prepares students for partnership is the act of being a partner and showing up ready to be the best partner that they can be. And by being makers together, we are compelled to learn about the context that we're making in and who we are making for. And we are imagining ourselves alongside those new students and thinking about the kind of engaged learning experience that excites them about partnership. Because these students that I work with today, they were those students who were new to partnership. And they were them pretty recently. And so in making curriculum together, we've had to dig around for resources, for readings, for videos, to think about what makes good quality, to think about how we sequence all those kinds of things that teachers do when they make curriculum are things that we do together with students. And all the time we're trying to think about how do we induct students into these resources as a way of scaffolding them into this idea of a partnership mindset. And this has been our development together and it's also been our preparation. And one of the lovely effects of our commitment to making together for others is that we have made an intellectual community for ourselves. And it's based on our partnership model. And you'll often see our team like this hanging out. And here we're taking a break from a piece of work that we've done together. We were at the university's open day recently in August, talking about our curriculum to prospective students. And so it's one of the lovely things about the work that we do that we get a chance to do this. So I'm going to close there. Thanks, folks. Thank you so much, Tai and team. And congratulations on going correctly to time right on the minute. So we've got, yeah, about five minutes left for questions. So did anyone want to ask the team anything over audio or over chat? Hi, can I ask a question? Yeah, thanks. Hi, I'm Mara, ever since I've been at the University of Canberra. I was just wondering, is the team brought together and are the students paid to do this work? Is it voluntary? Do you think there's a difference? Do you think there's one way it should be or shouldn't be? Or yeah, what are you thinking? I'll say it's paid. It is paid. But then I'll ask the students here to come in with their view on that. Yeah, like Tai said, we're paid. And I think from a student's perspective and the conversations that we've had, both within our team and in different settings at different conferences or with other colleagues at the University who are trying to implement different strategies to get students on board, I think one of the largest barriers they have to student participation is time and is the willingness of students to participate. And I think that when you're working with students, there's got to be some sort of recognition there that students are studying and they might have other commitments. So I think paying students is a mechanism, I guess, to kind of get them more on board to recognize their time and their experience. And I mean, we love the work that we do, but because we're paid, we are able to devote so much more of our time and attention to the work. Thank you, Lily. And we've also got a question in chat from Alex. So what has the engagement slash uptake been from? Are the staff professional and academic in the partnership space at Western Sydney? Has there been any resistance and do you have any tips for helping the staff component of the partnership mindset? Yeah. We'll open that up and everyone's to respond. I might take that one. The work that we've been doing together is on a kind of five-year strategic project and what that project has been doing is kind of setting the groundwork for the idea of business as usual. And so what that means is that while there's partnership at the university, it's been contained as part of this kind of strategic project. Some of the things that those strategic, that strategic project has done, though, is changed, for instance, changed policy settings for how curriculum gets developed. So when new subjects or courses go up for approval, they have to be co-designed with students. And that's a direct effect of the work that we're doing together. So there are some, there's still work for us to do, absolutely. But there are some institutional mechanisms that have changed that have the potential to grow partnership as a result of the work we're doing. And that's been a lovely byproduct, I think. I would say people want students as partners at our place. It's not really about, we haven't had much resistance at all. And that's because staff get to see the quality of what students make and they want it. And that's really cool, I reckon. That's amazing. And I like, I love how in your example of the Curiosity pod, you spoke about how it's scalable. So it's not just for your team or in isolation. It's really designed to broaden across the university. So that's really impressive. So we've probably got time for one more question. Now, someone had their hand up. Let me just get it. Yes, Freda. Did I say that right? Pedro, that's all good. Close. I was going to say thank you. That was amazing to kind of hear and have the students talk to some of this as well. I think I'm from ANU, so we're kind of right back at the start of putting together a student and staff partnership group. So I was wondering if from a student perspective, walking into that first session, kind of that kickoff workshop or meeting, what was something that you really valued or wish that had happened in that first kind of meeting? I'll take that one. In the first, I think when I first started off being a student partner, one of the first meetings, I remember feeling, I still feel like an imposter, but the imposter syndrome is very real and what I really valued and appreciated in those meetings with staff and students is just communicating that this is sort of new territory. We're all working together. We're making things together. And so it's about being... I really appreciated that patience and... What's the word for it? Just a full transparency and openness that we're here to make something together. And so we're here for each other. That's very, very important because students can often feel like an imposter and not know what to do because it's all foreign territory for them. They're so used to being in a transactional kind of a learning teaching environment where they're told what to do, right? For marks or credits or whatever that is. Whatever that may be. So in the first meeting, I think that's very important just to communication, number one. Yeah, I think the others might have something to add. I think, like Ty, just underscoring what Ty said at the end of our presentation. And this is a conversation that we've had. You know, how if we were to go back what we tell ourselves or what's a better way that we can kind of induct people into the process. And A, I think it's, firstly, it's important to be, to get comfortable being uncomfortable because ultimately you do learn to be the best partner by just kind of throwing yourself in and getting involved and you pick it up as you go and you might fumble along for a little bit and the staff might fumble along with you as they're learning too. But ultimately just kind of throwing yourself in, having a go and like Shivani said, just having those open lines of communication and learning together. Yeah, really being generous colleagues is what really helps, knowing when to ask for help and raising concerns when something's difficult and when things are not working productively, just making sure that that's all sort of laid out. That's very important in the first initial meetings and throughout, but yeah, particularly at the start.