Creating a collaborative learning community for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander health promotion students - enhancing access, progression and learning in higher education — Agentur Pty Ltd
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Creating a collaborative learning community for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander health promotion students - enhancing access, progression and learning in higher education (126)

Michelle Dickson 1 , Geoffrey Angeles 1 , Suzanne Plater 1 , Jonathan Birch 1
  1. Indigenous Health Programs, Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Background:

Good health promotion teaching and practice should involve a Community Engaged Learning and Teaching (CELT) approach. The Graduate Diploma in Indigenous Health Promotion (GDIHP) Alumni Project (Sydney School of Public Health, The University of Sydney) piloted an innovative approach to enhance the progression and experience of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students by inviting GDIHP alumni to come back and teach in the classroom to embed collaborative knowledge exchange into the university curricula.

Methods:

A Seed grant was received from the Federal Office of Learning and Teaching  to bring our alumni back to teach and mentor current students. Each  teaching Block,  GDIHP alumni spent two days with the students discussing the health promotion work they had done since completing the GDIHP, shared stories about their journey as a GDIHP student, and provided assessment task and other advice.

Results/Discussions:

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Positioning collaborative learning as its pedagogical framework and health promotion as its disciplinary foundation, this project modelled how Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students can  transform their understandings of their professional culture, and experience academic support through collaborative knowledge exchange with health promotion program alumni.

In addition to achieving Alumni collaboration for nine teaching blocks, the project established a model for alumni/program collaboration, and established a professional social networking site. Creative ways of engaging our learning community included the production of several short film clips, detailing the learning of both the students and the alumni.

Conclusions/implications:

This project enabled the University to bring alumni back into the university environment. As a result of the external evaluation, the “Alumni Engagement Project” would like work in  alumni workplaces and communities. Students, staff and alumni saw that a potential for increasing the community teaching and learning collaboration by respecting the true nature of two way learning and teaching. This model could be transferred to other health promotion  and educational settings.

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