Keynote Speakers
Professor Melinda Webber
Melinda Webber is a descendant of Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Hine, Ngati Kahu and Ngāti Whakaue. She is a Professor of Education at Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland and Pou Matarua (Co-Director) of the Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga Centre of Research Excellence. She leads several research projects focused on better understanding the effects of Māori student motivation and academic engagement, culturally sustaining teaching, localised curricula, and enduring school-family-community partnerships for learning. In 2024 Melinda Was the recipient of several prestigious research grants including a Marsden grant titled ‘Me aro ki te hā o Hineahuone: Pay heed to the dignity and power of women’ and a Health Research Council grant titled “Te Unaunahi i Whakapiripiri ki te Ika nui ā Mauī.“ Both projects will examine the educational potential of mātauranga Māori for Māori student motivation and educational engagement.
How the Mana Model and Other Mātauranga Māori Learning Frameworks Can Help Us to Reconceptualise Teaching and Learning
How can educators create learning environments that foster the innate mana of students? Mana is a concept that comes from a Māori worldview and refers to a person’s sense of authority, influence, self-efficacy, purpose, pride, and belonging. From a Māori perspective, all students possess mana; inherent capabilities that enable them to learn and positively transform the world around them. The Mana Model contends that student thinking, behaviour, and wellbeing are motivated by the desire to achieve a sense of mana, and like other mātauranga Māori-informed teaching and learning frameworks, is useful for understanding the ways that universities can be an influential space to harness and transform students’ motivation, knowledge, skills, capabilities, interests and aspirations. Mātauranga Māori-informed learning frameworks emphasize student connectedness, belonging to place, cultural identity, academic efficacy, and willingness to develop diverse academic, cross-cultural, social, and psychological competencies. These competencies are crucial foundations for learning and should be central to learning environments, teaching pedagogy, and practice.
Professor Sarah Elaine Eaton
Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education and Chair, Leadership, Policy, and Governance specialization area at the University of Calgary. She holds a concurrent appointment as an Honorary Associate Professor, Deakin Learning Futures, Deakin University, Australia.
Professor Eaton is an internationally recognized authority in the field of academic ethics. Her work can be found in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, the British Educational Research Journal, Educational Policy, and the Journal of Academic Ethics, among other places and she serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Educational Integrity (Springer Nature). Dr. Eaton was the co-founder (2018) and co-editor (2018-2020) of Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity. In 2020 she received the National Research and Scholarship award from the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education (CSSHE) for her contributions to research on academic integrity in Canadian higher education. In 2022, she received the outstanding research award from the European Network for Academic Integrity (ENAI).
Grounding Ourselves in Shifting Terrain: Postplagiarism and Academic Integrity in a Changing Educational Landscape
Teaching and assessing have become increasingly complex with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) apps and tools that students can access freely or at a low cost. Our understandings of how to engage with students in ways that are meaningful and ethical continue to shift. Join us for a thought-provoking presentation on how GenAI apps are impacting teaching, learning, assessment, and academic integrity. We will also consider how GenAI tools can serve as an equity accelerator in terms of helping students with diverse learning needs. Dr. Eaton believes that there can be no integrity without equity, and thinking about how GenAI tools can catalyze inclusion and accessibility is an important part of the conversation. We explore broad ethical and practical implications of AI for educational contexts. This talk is not about how to catch students cheating, instead, how technological advances challenge us to reconceptualize what it means to teach, learn, and assess learning ethically. It’s all about supporting students to be their best selves in and beyond the classroom.
ISSOTL25 | CLOSING PLENARY SESSION
Views from the Volcano: It’s Fun to Have a SoTL Family
Ben Kennedy, University of Canterbury
Sriparna Saha, University of Canterbury
Lais Corvaes, University of Canterbury
Kamen Engel, University of Canterbury
Alison Jolley, University of Waikato
Session Description
This SOTL research team will share their SOTL stories through tales of earthquakes, mountains, and volcanoes and how they have worked with kids, university students, cultural experts, artists, and computer game designers in their SOTL activities. Their key message is that researching how we teach and how our students learn is fun, makes us a better teachers and our students better learners.
Ben, a research volcanologist, will present his story of growing a science education research whānau (family) at the University of Canterbury, highlighting the role of inspirational supervisors during graduate school and SOTL mentors and training such as the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative. Specifically, he will show how the incredible volcanic and cultural landscapes of Aotearoa give meaning to his research. Sriparna will share some of the lessons learnt in reciprocity during her research work with various cultural experts in Aotearoa and how that has shaped the way she now approaches the teaching and research landscape. Laís will speak on her experience when working with youth in favelas in Brazil and share how researching education in both Brazil and Aotearoa have changed her relationship with science. Kamen will discuss how his passion for photography and science communication led him to explore the benefits of blended learning. And Alison will highlight how her science education research has led to SOTL collaborations and how her identity as an academic developer has both shaped and been shaped by this work.
Speaker Biographies
Alison Jolley
Alison Jolley (AJ) is a Senior Lecturer of Academic Development at Te Puna Ako – Centre for Tertiary Teaching & Learning at the University of Waikato. She has a background in geoscience and is passionate about empowering teaching staff to support affective outcomes in their practice, especially within the context of experiential learning.
Ben Kennedy
Ben really, really, loves volcanoes. He is also an award-winning teacher and science communicator and leads a research group at the University of Canterbury that focuses on science education research. He works on place-based education, fieldtrips, virtual environments, MOOCS, flipped classrooms, and with communities around volcanoes. He is an alumni from the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative.
Kamen Engel
Kamen is a Geology Masters of Science graduate from the University of Canterbury. During Covid, he used his passion for photography and microscopy to develop online labs for an undergraduate geology course. Having been a former student in the same course, Kamen provides insight into the student view to the scholarship of teaching and learning research.
Lais Corvaes
Laís is a PhD researcher at the University of Canterbury. After getting a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in geology from prestigious universities in Brazil (UFPR, UNICAMP), she got interested in studying how kids develop a liking for sciences. Working in Brazil and Aotearoa New Zealand, her research surrounds children’s science identity, their perceptions about science and scientists and how place-conscious learning of geosciences can affect the development of an identity as a “science person.”
Sriparna Saha
Sriparna is a geologist and passionate science communicator, currently serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Canterbury. Her work sits at the intersection of geology, education, and community engagement, with a focus on co-creating place-based curricula in collaboration with local stakeholders. With teaching and research experience spanning Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States, and India, she brings a skills-based approach that emphasizes effective communication and the development of adaptable, collaborative educational resources.
