In conversation together : student ambassadors for cultural competence

Amani and Tai: We’re academic developers interested in working in partnership with students. In 2014, we trialled partnership through working with six Student Ambassadors as part of the Sydney Teaching Colloquium. The Colloquium is the university’s annual teaching conference and usually draws around 300 participants, mainly academics, to discuss teaching and curriculum practices. The theme of the 2014 Colloquium was ‘Is our assessment up to standard?’ The Student Ambassadors: • developed a social media campaign to engage the Sydney student community in the Colloquium; • designed a session on assessment to present at the Colloquium; • devised and executed a Colloquium evaluation strategy; • curated and developed resources; and • contributed to the planning and writing of a co-authored journal publication (Peseta et al., 2016). The experiences and outcomes from the trial gave us courage to try again and so the following year, we engaged another six Student Ambassadors for the 2015 Colloquium. This time the theme was ‘Cultural competence is everyone’s business,’ which linked with the university’s new strategic focus on cultural competence (The University of Sydney Strategic Plan, 2016-2020). We followed the 2014 model described in Peseta et al. (2016), where students were selected via an expression of interest and interview process. We were mainly looking for undergraduate students interested in learning about cultural competence (CC), who could see the relevance of CC to students’ experiences of university more broadly and had creative ideas about how to do it, and who wanted to develop their knowledge of university CC initiatives. The students were paid for their time spent as an ambassador, which involved approximately 40 hours of face-to-face meetings, preparation, participation in the Colloquium, and a post-Colloquium focus group over 3-4 months.