Trust, community key to engaging learning experiences

Shirley Alexander: I'm now very pleased to introduce, in case there's anyone in the room who doesn't know her, Dr Amanda White.

Amanda is the Deputy Head in Education of the Accounting discipline in the UTS Business School and has been part of the Business School for almost 20 years.

Now you may have heard that there's something Amanda loves to do - audit! Amanda loves to audit and she is puts her heart and soulinto improving the student learning experience, through the use of technology learning, and it is a social and emotional journey for students and she designs learning experiences with that in mind.

Now Amanda has been the recipient of a UTS Individual Teaching Award, numerous faculty awards an AAUT citation for outstanding contribution to student learning and in 2020 she was awarded the Australian Awards for University Teaching Excellence Award for Law, Business, Economics and related areas.

Now there are only three national teaching awards given out last year so it's it's a wonderful acknowledgement of everything that Amanda does for students that she was one of those three recipients - it is a really important award, it it recognises Australia's most outstanding university teachers. It's about the enrichment of the student experience and the improvement of learning outcomes through innovation and quality teaching over a sustained period.

So in the absence of a National Teaching Awards Ceremony, the Vice-Chancellor is going to present Amanda with her award

I'm going to pop this over here and I forgot to say that Amanda is going to give the keynote address.

Amanda White: Thank you Shirley and to everybody here.

I'm standing away from the lectern because I'm sort of short and standing behind it makes me feel really closed in.

So I'm going to try and keep to my 10 minutes - I can see the countdown and there's a lot of pressure there, it's very authentic.

So this quote here comes from 'The Courage to Teach' and it's the late Professor Tracey Bretag that introduced me to this book in 2019 and it just crystallised everything that I couldn't put my finger on that was why i wanted to be a teacher - that it's holding a mirror to my soul, it's that I'm bringing my whole self to my class. My students know about 'Audit Senior' and 'Audit Junior' - my two children and how that fits into my life. 

And you know they're not upset when assignment marks are late for one week because I've got two kids with gastro so helping bring myself into the class for me is really important and I thank Tracey for that. Unfortunately she passed away last year.

So when I was asked to give this keynote, you know people were saying like 'we want to hear about your story' so this is me - 18, 19, 20 year old me. I wanted to be an accounting partner at a public accounting firm and then on that track I was doing my honours program as part of a research program thanks to Professor David Brown, and September 11 happened and I remember getting in a taxi to go to the airport and the taxi driver said 'Are you sure you want to go to the airport?'. 

I said "Why?" and he explained what had happened and that was a point in time that was a real reflection point for me. I thought, "What am I doing? I'm helping big companies make a lot of money. And I read Dr David Suzuki's book about superspecies and evolution and I thought "I want to do more, I want to have real impact. Rather than help big companies make more money I wanted to have that social impact and it was then - I don't even think Dr David Brown - at that point, who said "Come to university. This is where you can make impact."

And I remember being at my first ever faculty retreat with my school and I think somebody from IML was there facilitating a discussion about what did we see ourselves as when it came to teaching and people were talking about content delivery and skills and I said, "I want to know my students, I want them to be able to come to me for advice - I want to be part of their learning journey".

And I was pooh-poohed on that idea quite a lot. 

It was, "Amanda, in two years you'll be as cynical as the rest of us, every student is trying to screw you over, everybody is trying to get the highest mark for the least amount of work possible, you don't want to get to know these people".

And I'm really glad that I didn't listen to the people that gave me that advice, and I listened to the fabulous educators that I met across the university,  people like Jon Tyler, who said to me "Amanda, teaching is so important,  what you're doing is so important you're representing young Asian women and what they can do in academia, in business, and accounting."

So it's really important to listen to the voices that tell you the positive things about being a university educator it's not just the thing you do besides research. What we do has real impact, and so that advice - holding on to those nuggets - was really important.

Now I haven't attributed this to anyone because I guess I say this a lot and I didn't get it from anywhere so I guess it's me. I should have self-attributed - I don't know how that works within my academic integrity knowledge.

But learning is not only a cognitive process but an emotional one as well. Trust is required for students to invest emotionally in learning and when they invest in emotionally they are so powerful in terms of their learning.

But today, trust is not automatically given to us as educator. When i was a student we just trusted the professor, we trusted the coordinator. 

So how do we earn it?

I wanted to share my journey about how we earn trust with generations today and so the first one is considering student well-being.

I've always been a big, you know, proponent of pastoral care. Every student since I started teaching in 2002 has my mobile phone number and I have not received one terrible phone call ever. I've received wedding invitations by text, baby shower, bridal shower invitations.

But well-being is is at the heart of what I do. 

It's the heart of building that trust, showing that you care about students: "How was that job interview?" Tell me about your work," and trying to relate that.

The other thing that helps me build trust is by being open. This is an Instagram story where I'd written a fantastic quiz for the wrong week and then I had to write another one but I was open with them that I'd made that mistake. I'm also open about you know who I am as a person, that I'm a daughter of migrants, about my story, and the picture there is me and fried rice and for anybody who's watching on the livestream who's one of my former students, they will understand how fried rice comes into the accounting and auditing area.

I'm also open with all of my resources and I have UTS to thank for this. When I started making videos somebody came to me from IT and said "Amanda, you're using all our bandwidth. Did you know every time a student presses play on one of your videos that's embedded in Blackboard, it downloads and we get charged for that."

So they said "Put it somewhere else," and they were the ones who said, "Start a YouTube channel."

So whoever that was in IT, thank you!

So I'm sharing resources to help students to help other academics at other institutions. We share all of our work on academic integrity board game - thank you to Tyler Key and Emma Gogolewski, who are my students as partners in this project.

This now is being used across many universities - it's Creative Commons - they've remixed it, they've reused it - it's fantastic.

And also being open about my journey as an academic - when it's tough, when it's great, because not everything is, you know, smiles and awards.

There's lots of times where things don't work - which takes me to experimentation.

I build trust by experimenting with my students. I'm always asking them for feedback - sometimes I think they're sick of it - "What did you think of this week's activity" "Did it help you?" "How could it be improved?"

So we're always experimenting with our students.

I'm really excited to announce that in 2022 I'll be teaching the Introductory Accounting subject as part of the new, revamped Bachelor of Business, and we are going to have students as partners, students as co-creators and it's going to be one amazing experiment - you won't be able to hold me back. 

I'm going big bang, wholesale change on Introductory Accounting,  so I apologise to all the other disciplines in business if I do manage to convince all 1,600 of our students to come into the Accounting major.

The other thing that helps build trust is by building community - it's that reputational value.

I always say to students, "If you go to a job interview don't be afraid to drop my name" - I've taught almost everybody in audit across UTS for the last 15 years.

My former students are partners, they're directors, and so I build community and that means when I turn up to a conference, like at top left, people are waving me down, "Amanda, let me tell you about what I've been doing".

I needed auditors for an industry event and I put out a call on LinkedIn and by the end of the day I had 20 people who wanted to come and  participate.

William Tan is one of those who came through the U@Uni program - the first year of U@Uni program. We're so proud of him and Camille Woods,

is one of my tutors now, so she's an industry academic that comes in to work with us.

It also means that I really miss graduations! I don't know about anybody else - all the clapping, all the shaking hands, all the high fives.

It's by creating that community, and I really rode the wave of social media - I have I don't know 3,000 friends on Facebook - that's all my former students  - LinkedIn. It means that if I need to connect students - someone's looking for a job opportunity, someone's looking for some advice on forensic accounting, or what a career assessment centre is like - I can almost always find them an alumni to connect with and that community flows through.

Students come to my subject knowing what to expect, knowing that they're going to be looked after, that if they need help they've got it.

And even for my students that don't end up being accountants I don't hold that against them - we can't all be awesome accountants.

But that means I can leverage off those students and say "hey, do you want to share your story about how working at Arnott's as a brand

manager -  how you use accounting every single day in your job'" - so community to me is really, really important.

I love hearing good news stories from my students: "I got a grad job,' "I got to the next level," "I've just been promoted to partner", "Oh my God, I've just been made CEO."

So the CEO of Clickview is one of my former students.

Oh impressive, oh, there we go.

So the key here is that mirror from that quote at the beginning, where teaching is a reflection of our soul, and we need to be willing to hold ourselves up to the mirror. And it's not always going to be pretty - some days you try something and it's just not going to work - and you have to acknowledge that.

I acknowledge that I make lots of mistakes - I tell that to my students. Talking about failure is talking about learning, and I'm really passionate about

sharing that with my students.

They say "Amanda, why is the quiz so hard?" and I say "Because it's hard when you do it on your own, but, hey look, in a group of five you've got 100 attempting the questions the first time around," and they see the value of learning from that failure and from reflection.

I've revamped my subject - I think I've torn it to the ground and rebuilt it three times in 15 years, which i think is quite an interesting perspective.

Now I've got one second to go so it's I don't know if it's going to start counting the other way but - "What is my secret sauce?" people often say.

Like "Amanda how do you stay so optimistic?"

This is my 20th year at UTS and I was an undergraduate here as well back in 1997.

So I've been part of the institution for such a long time, but my secret sauce to staying optimistic, to staying passionate when it comes to education amidst all of the doom and gloom that we often face in higher education - is to stay connected with your students.

Staying connected after graduation is such a wonderful thing.

Even through their programs being open, to change and accepting of failure - we don't talk about failure enough - we had a failure festival last year with the LXLab and people said it was just so great to talk about stuff that didn't work.

It's so important to talk about the stuff that doesn't work and then finding your community of practice. At UTS we have the LX Lab and we have IML and Kathy and the great first year experience - first and further year experience -I should say.

I found a lot of that community on Twitter. If you're not feeling that you're in that community. that you're not getting that support - higher education twitter is a fantastic place to be for new ideas and for support. And sometimes that's virtual, sometimes it's in person.

I once cornered Carol Dweck of 'The Growth Mindset' at an event I just said. "Look Carol, Professor Dweck, I'm just so excited to meet you - I just want to tell you about how we're implementing this for university students and what a difference it's making."

So find those people, listen to those voices that lift you up, and ignore those voices that say "teaching is just a thing we do, it's a thing to phone it in, it's a thing that, you know, you just have to be barely passable at."

Being a teacher is a great privilege and it's a great honour, and let's treat it like that.

Thank you.