Getting To Better Together

Five Women and a Podcast

In this episode, the general manager of CIDSEL and special guest for Richard Bawden, Tami Harriott, facilitates a conversation with four highly successful women from South Asia.

Where are our Elders?

An elder in Aboriginal civilisation has been defined as someone who has gained recognition as a custodian of knowledge and lore – the customs, legends and myths that have been held for millennia. Whilst there are differences within different communities, one common trait among indigenous elders is a deep spirituality – a commitment to a worldview that, at base, means that there is more to life, and indeed to the entire universe, than ‘meets the eye’, so to speak. Some meaningful connection between oneself and something much greater, that calls for a deep appreciation of oneness or wholeness and which demands the fusion or synthesis of the self with the other, of parts with wholes, of the material with the spiritual, of facts with values, of knowledge with wisdom, of actions with ethics.
Do we, non-Aboriginal Australians have, within our industrial society, any equivalent role models with similar intellectual, moral and spiritual competencies?
In this episode, our host Richard Bawden talks with someone who has many of the very characteristics of the sort of contemporary eldership that we should perhaps be seeking to seriously explore. David Chittelborough is a professor of pedology and biogeochemistry at the University of the Sunshine Coast and an adjunct Professor of the University of Adelaide. He is also a Baha’i, a congregant of a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people and where the essential quest is to find a unifying vision of the future of society and of nature, and the purpose of life.

Storytelling as a Way of Knowing

In a recent solo episode in this mini-series, our host, Richard Bawden, talked of the significance of three different ways of knowing and their associated bodies of knowledge that he believes are foundational to addressing the pressing issues of this modern industrial era - ecological, economic, and ethical. These, he submitted, are critical foundations for responsible judgements in the face of current and potential challenges to our current ways of behaving in the world about us. Ecology reveals the nature and significance of inter-relationships within nature and between living systems and their dynamic environments. Economics helps us understand costs and benefits, optimal resource uses, and consumer choices, while ethics allows us to adjudge our actions from the perspective of moral concerns for the good, the just, the fair, the equitable, and the responsible.
What does all of this mean in practice? Can we provide examples of where these three ways of knowing help us to at least clarify the issues, that we need to address? In this episode, Richard explores some of these matters with his guest, Dr Jane Palmer who has a very special interest in storytelling as a research methodology – an approach which revealed some profoundly disturbing issues from people living in traumatic circumstances, when she adopted it as a research methodology in Aceh in Indonesia following a catastrophic tsunami.
Jane is an Adjunct Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests include the use of storytelling methods in post-conflict or marginalized communities to explore the processes of
trauma, grief, resilience and adaptation. She has undertaken fieldwork in Indonesia and in regional and remote Australia, and has published in the areas of ethics, fieldwork methodologies, Indigenous studies and futures studies.

International Women’s Day

On March 8th we celebrate the International Woman’s Day [IWD] in Australia - although it would be more accurate to state that this celebration is somewhat conditional, for there remain issues that we need to still address in this country with respect to reaching gender parity. Furthermore, as Australians, with respect to our global responsibilities as citizens of the world, we also need to contribute to the acceleration of the quest for women’s equality across the entire world. There are still far too many situations which are not cause for celebration in this regard: far too many circumstances where women are far from equal in the scheme of things. And this is although International Women’s Day is marked worldwide on March 8th, every year, as it has been since it started as a global event way back in the early 1900s.
At CIDSEL this global responsibility is taken very seriously particularly given that the central focus of the Centre is international development – the perpetual quest for inclusive betterment within a global context. There is an explicit commitment to Embrace Equity which happens to be the specific theme for the IWD for 2023. Conceptual frameworks and specific activities for addressing what are referred to as GEDSI matters – Gender Equity, Disability, and Social Inclusion – are incorporated in every development project or program and accepted as moral duties.
Richard’s guest in this episode, Tami Harriott, assumes special responsibilities for GEDSI issues and has a deep commitment to GEDSI principles and practices within CIDSEL. The fact that she also the General Manager of this Centre, with profound commitments to gender issues consolidated through extensive international experience, further emphasises the importance of these dimensions to the Centre’s initiatives - which of course include this podcast miniseries.

Making Sense of the World About Us

In essence, what we each ‘do’ in, and to the world about us, is overwhelmingly influenced by how we each ‘see’ that world: how each of us attempts to make sense of what is happening about us as a prelude for doing something in response. We refer to our ‘way of seeing’ in this context, as our worldviews. These reflect complex sets of beliefs and value assumptions that we hold (but which mostly remain in our sub-consciousness). In the process of growing up, and without appreciating the details, we each discover that not everybody has same view of the world as we do. Indeed, we find out, pretty early in life as it happens, that profound differences in worldviews between us often leads to disagreements about events and ideas and opinions: just think politics and polarisation.
The nature and significance of these worldviews are the topics of the conversation in this episode between our host Richard Bawden and Melanie Williams who has conducted significant research into these matters. Melanie is an Associate Professor at the William Angliss Institute in Melbourne where she is the Associate Dean with special responsibilities for Scholarship. Her primary role is to support vocational education teachers as they seek to improve their teaching and learning practice: Getting to Better Together in action!

Social Entrepreneurship in Action

When we hear the word ‘entrepreneurship’, the image that all too often springs to mind is less than flattering, to say the least.  “The Wolves of Wall Street at work using someone else’s money to make money for themselves”. “Private gain is the go and Greed is Good”. In reality of course, an entrepreneur is anyone who sets up a business - typically, an innovator and risk taker who is essentially seeking to make honest money through private, personal enterprise. There is, however, a special brand of entrepreneurship for which the objective is not private gain but public good. Social entrepreneurs seek to serve communities which are characteristically un- or underserved. The focus is on those who are typically excluded in society, the disadvantaged, the invisibles, the strugglers and so on who could, given the opportunity, be more commercially successful.  
Richard’s guest in this episode, Martha Joylyne Raka, is an inspirational living example of one such community-oriented social entrepreneur.  Martha is from Papua New Guinea where she works with groups of small farmers establishing collaborative partnerships and co-operatives that have the function of helping all involved to Get to Better through working Together.

What’s in a Word?

Effective communication is an essential aspect of Getting to Better Together. How could we ever achieve anything if we were unable to understand each other: if we fail to agree about the meaning of anything? Yet, at the same time, communication would be virtually impossible if we paused to reflect on matters of meaning and language and understanding every time we said something to someone else. Somehow or another, we seem to muddle through conversations with relative ease once we have reached a certain level of language proficiency. To reflect on these matters might seem to be all too academic to have any consequence in our everyday worlds: yet, it is anything but, as anyone who has tried to learn a second language will most certainly have discovered. Dr Levi Durbridge, Richard’s guest in this episode, has given these matters very serious consideration. Levi, who is fluent in Japanese as a second language, is Lecturer in World Languages at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He has been involved in language education across the secondary and tertiary sectors for more than 18 years in both Australia and Japan. His research explores how international mobility, language contact and technology use, all intersect with each other.

The Magic of Group Consciousness

What’s significant about togetherness in the pursuit of Getting to Better? Well it would seem that when we really work closely together in some form of collective or other, that we can achieve a state of group consciousness where we feel so immersed in the culture of the group – be it a commercial business, a voluntary organisation, an educational institution, a sporting team, or whatever - that we feel that we are being embraced by a sense of a collective spirit.  It’s not just that we are working together but that we are somehow as one, in some manner or another, that brings a special feeling to togetherness that allows us to flourish in our collective endeavours.  A sense of we are assumes an importance beyond the all too frequent, I am as a dominant feature of our culture.
These fascinating matters are the subject of the conversation in this episode between our host Richard Bawden and his guest, Dr Helen Russ who has been researching into these matters and consulting with organisations from a unique We Are perspective, for a considerable length of time.  Helen’s investigations have included working with organisations overseas, especially Ireland and the USA as well as within Australia.

Going Glocal

The central theme of our podcast mini-series of Getting to Better Together, is that it is only through collaboration that we will be able to deal successfully with the really pressing issues of the day. How can we trigger local community responses to matters, like climate change, that have global dimensions with local impacts? This represents a particular challenge to local governments. How are Shire Councils currently managing the necessary balance between the traditional local preoccupations (the infamous 4Rs - roads, rubbish, rats and rates) and the seemingly ever-emerging global challenges that pose real threats to local communities, like raging bushfires, floods, extreme weather events, and coastal erosions?
In today’s episode, our host Richard Bawden discusses how the local Noosa Council is dealing with these global/local or ‘glocal’ challenges with the Mayor, Clare Stewart. Clare holds degrees in business as well as in law, including a Master of Laws and was a barrister before her marriage. She is a public speaker, a former nationally accredited mediator, and the author of an extraordinarily poignant autobiography, Standing on my Own Two Feet.

What’s STEM and why is it important?

In Australia, the service industries now provide virtually four jobs out of five while our exports are dominated by primary resources from mining and agriculture. Whatever happened to our manufacturing industries? When we compare ourselves to other developed economies it would seem that we lag significantly behind them as an industrialised nation and this is in spite of many emerging opportunities. Are we too complacent to care, happy just to rely on what we have been doing successfully for the past couple of centuries or so? Do we not value innovation and entrepreneurship sufficiently to make the effort to respond to emerging industrial opportunities?  Most importantly, are our educational institutions, at all levels, failing to focus sufficiently on science and technology and on engineering and mathematics – the so-called STEM subjects - to encourage our young people to seek opportunities in secondary industries?
In this episode of our podcast mini-series, our host Richard Bawden welcomes back the experienced educator Tony Richardson to discuss the nature and significance of STEM subjects, particularly in secondary education. Given the potential for the development of new technologies for renewable energies alone, Australia has abundant opportunities for coming generations of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. STEM certainly demands our urgent attention.