Students as Partners, Creating Connections and Belonging in the Classroom | 11 March

We warmly invite you to join us for another webinar in the ‘Hot Topics’ series: Student Engagement and Belonging.

Hear from UTS students, Elham Hafiz and Bethlehem Mekonnen, and project staff Susan Hansen and Dianne Moy from the Welcome and Belonging Project, sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. This important project involved six UTS students in a participatory design process, and ran in the latter half of 2020 in response to the rapid shift to remote teaching and the University’s concerns about the impacts of COVID on student wellbeing. In the project, the students co-designed and worked to address the brief:  

Create opportunities to build the connections that strengthen belonging and UTS’s identity as a diverse university that cares

You might remember that we heard from Elham, Bethlehem and their peers in the FFYE Forum (see blog) back in September 2020, where Elham shared her heartfelt and powerful poems about her sense of belonging, and the student group invited us to think more on the possibilities that a ‘Students as Partners’ approach could offer our programs and practices at UTS.  

In this upcoming webinar, Elham, Bethlehem, Susan and Dianne will share their insights from the project, as well as some practical ideas about how we partner with students to create a relationship-rich culture in the classroom.  

We have so much to learn from listening to our students’ perspectives. We hope to see you there. 

Facilitators: Kathy Egea and Alisa Percy
Teaching and Curriculum Team, IML