VIRTUAL: Applying Education
Abstract
Work integrated learning (WIL) environments are designed to assist students in consolidating their acquired knowledge and skills, apply them to real world settings and develop a professional identity. Promoting industry engagement and assisting students make links between what they are learning and how it applies to professional practice is one of our key roles as educators. Studies in the relationship between well-being and learning confirm the need for tertiary educators to consider how personal values, health and behaviours radically interact with skills development in the designing and implementation of our teaching and learning programs (Houghton & Anderson, 2017; Dodd, et.al., 2021). It is an imperative we keep abreast of contemporary media practices, build effective networks with community and industry and generate partnerships to assist students as they navigate their way through the academy in an increasingly complex world. Commensurate with the unpredictability of the education landscape our focus is less on content delivery and more on developing critical thinking skills, well-being and values based-learning strategies. This move away from primarily information-based curriculum is informed by studio and project based learning and experiential methodologies that promote student centred approaches with high levels of self-directed learning and tutors in role as facilitators (Reis, 2003; Wood & Tanner, 2012). In our presentation, we will discuss our respective pedagogical approaches to the Yagan Square digital tower project designed to promote student engagement with their own communities and how to work with an external organisation who also act as a client and mentors to students.
I am a creative media researcher, educator and filmmaker. I have produced quality live performance and screen content, devising new works, cross-disciplinary, social justice and memory narratives. My portfolio includes documentaries, short fiction, dance films, corporate, educational and virtual 3D digital texts. My works have screened in national and international film festivals, television, galleries, exhibitions, online. I have expertise teaching culturally diverse cohorts, facilitating community engagement and building partnerships through creative interdisciplinary teaching practices.
I am a researcher and lecturer in screen studies. I am author of Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction. I also research into new viewing practices in relation to multiplatform television. I worked as a television producer for over a decade in the Australian pay TV industry and maintain a research interest in new forms of television. I also lectured, and taught at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Macquarie University, University of Technology Sydney and the University of New South Wales. My current research interests include, post-broadcast television, Gilles Deleuze and feminist film theory, film philosophy, digital and multi-platform television, Screen Studies education, horror films, affective dimensions of media.