What I really think universities will look like in 20 years: Initial remarks IRU conference.

Hi Everybody. My name is Shivani and I am currently a Master of Public Health student at Western Sydney University. I’ve been a student for 6 years now. Three of which, I have also been a student partner. Currently im one of the coordinating leads of the WSU Students Partners. I also sit on the strategic initiatives board looking at postgrad microcreds.

It should come as no surprise at all that wwhat I am about to talk about is student-staff partnership. When you do student-staff partnership every day and long enough …you become well aware of how it can be transformative and exhausting and how it starts to become a curiosity tool that reveals the university in different ways.

So what does student-staff partnership reveal?:

Firstly, Students today live at a time where the problems that surround them are big and wicked. Really complex and wicked problems require expertise in multiple disciplines to solve them.…

Our future relies on universities to provide that sort of education. A making of new transdisciplinary degrees or redesigning existing degrees transdisciplinarity friendly. And then, Students need to know those degrees exist and take up those transdisciplinary degrees.

All these efforts will not work, without students understanding how to choose and shape their degrees. So, lets start there as a first step. There is a real opportunity here.

Secondly, at the class-room level, Student-staff partnership is a shift from seeing students as data points to seeing students as co-inquirers. And It can be as simple as designing the marking criteria with your students.

It makes the learning experience at the classroom level infinitely better

Universities should start to see their students in classrooms as partners.

Third and my last point in the student-partner reveals series,

My hope for Universities is that they continue to uplift the communities the way we already are.
Remember the students in classroom and those thinking about transdisciplinary problems…Think more carefully about how you can involve students doing their degrees with community. Think of them as partners and that might even lift some of us out of student poverty.

I’ll leave you with this quote by Peseta and Salibury, Universities are these magical possibility spaces. They always have been.
20 years from now, I hope Student-staff Partnership is an obvious way of doing things at University.
I think my time’s up.. thank you.