This week’s TESQA Conference was surprisingly refreshing.
The malaise of the sector being unloved by government and overwhelmed by unprecedented change was replaced with a general acceptance that change is happening. Directions were set (100% submission on GenAI action plans), managing risks was front and centre, and impact on students a clear (and repeated) priority.
There was broad consensus on why change is needed, and insightful presentations from educators on the what needs to be done. But the real challenge for the sector lies with the how.
When it comes to the how, the path is anything but straightforward. Change fatigue, academic resistance, financial constraints, changing student expectations, and workload and external pressures are but a handful of the hurdles facing the tertiary sector.
The how is hard.
This complex how needs to progress well past simple top-down directives, or often slow, bottom up approaches.
What the sector needs now, is middle-out leadership.
By this, we mean the middle layer of leadership who coordinate ‘whole of program’ curriculum, who connect initiatives across subjects, units, or courses; in other words, those who translate what they’ve been told from the top, or the bottom, to create a cohesive learning experience for our students.
These leaders have always played a pivotal role in operationalising the vision of universities and providers, but now is time to give them power to advocate for change as well, and to hopefully enact it too.
The means in which they lead may be varied: from co-design approaches, to contextualised understandings of their discipline, to reflecting on the ways in which programs serve the local communities and industry partners. But it is exactly through this variation and nuancing that the how work will get done.
So while the TEQSA conference was refreshing, the work is far from over.
And the real challenge remains: how will this work get done? And how will universities and providers support middle-out leaders to lead it?
Written by Professor Mollie Dollinger from Curtin University and Professor Kelly Matthews from the University of Queensland (at TESQA Conference tea breaks).
