I have indeed been out and about as I travelled to Rockhampton last week for the Educational Justice Symposium. It was an honour to view the welcome to country and meet a number of academics from America as part of the Educational Justice Institute. It was a small gathering but that made the conversations long, warm and so very valuable. I learnt a lot from the formal proceedings but I learnt even more during conversations over lunch and dinner.

Educational Justice Institute | EJI

I did three presentations in the end. The first one was around my PhD work: Creating Conditions for Confidence: Equity-Focused Approaches to Fostering Students’ Self-Efficacy.

The second one was about social equity discourses and educator views: Educator Views on Access, Equity and Merit.

The final presentation was The Experience of Marginalised Students Entering University through Vocational Education: The Context, the Pathways and the Lived Experience. This was based on the work that I have been doing with Susan Emmett and in the end I did not use the Powerpoint slides – it became a casual conversation with an audience of about 15.

The main thing that I took home with me was noting how relational the Americans were – they did not talk about pedagogies of care, but it was very clear that their practice centered on relational pedagogies and pastoral care. Overall, it was awesome – just awesome.

In other news – the Wellbeing SIG from NAEEA has an edited book coming soon! It is now on the Routledge website: https://www.routledge.com/Trauma-Informed-Teaching-in-Non-Traditional-Spaces-Stories-Scholarship-and-Strategies/Maclaurin-Jones/p/book/9781041313441

Gemma and I were section editors and had chapters of our own as well. The team was just amazing, inspiring and overall excellent – led by Anita Maclaurin and Angela Jones – legends!

There is a lot of other things going on at the moment but I will leave it there for now and “attempt” to write again soon.