My trip down to the Springfield campus of UniSQ was smooth and uneventful. The hotel was lovely and I was able to stop as see my colleagues at the Bundaberg Campus on the way down too. There was around 50 to 60 people attending the Colloquium in person but more tuned in online for the keynote and panel discussions.

Andrew Harvey did an excellent presentation around access to higher education. It was that big picture sort of policy stuff with a heap of pretty graphs and statistics. I was privileged to have a quick chat with him beforehand.

Then there was the panel discussion and they are always excellent. A man was brave enough to ask a question DURING their parts. I understand why, there was only about 50 people there and the atmosphere was relaxed. Anyway because he did I piped up too. They were talking about community and connection and I asked how to NOT make it tokenistic. I got a great response from Andrew which included ideas around being consistent across the whole process, not rushing, etc. I then, quite bravely, suggested that sounded like it would need “stable, long-term funding”. The chuckles in the crowd and the knowing looks I got from the panel were GOLD. I loved it. A gentlemen approached me later and said “your the women who asked the good questions” – he could only see the back of my head so he wasn’t sure it was me. I laughed!

My own presentation was good. I was in a concurrent session with Sarah Hattam so naturally she had the majority of the audience. I was ok with that. It went smoothly.

The other stand out presentation was from Charmaine Davis and Jonathon Green. They were talking about Enabling Education as an emerging discipline. They did a fairly serious literature review AND then also compared the literature in Enabling to Higher Education literature more generally. Not a heap of surprises in their finding but DARN that is going to be a well cited article when it comes out. So useful to have the analysis to back up things we know anecdotally.

I am back to reality now. Marking right before the deadline. Sigh.