Attribute Twelve

Facilitate the ability of student graduates to participate with confidence in the future workforce as capable and sustainable practioners.

During my courses I don't work with or teach about materials or design projects, so there is limited opportunity to work with my students around sustainable use of materials. Instead I focus on emotional/social sustainability. As a lecturer who works with students in lower level qualifications my students often have relatively poor interpersonal skills and struggle to relate appropriately with staff and other students. I spend a lot of time calling students out on poor behavior and derogatory/offensive language, jokes, and comments. After pointing out their behavior to them I try to engage them in conversation about why their behaviour is inappropriate and ask them to think about how it might impact others around them and whether they think it would be appropriate in a work place environment.

An example of this would be with my first Bridging stream which had difficulties around this. After discussing this issue with them several times, individually and as a class, I took a tally on the board for every inappropriate comment. By the end of the class the students were incredibly surprised to see how many tallies there were. I continued to use the tally system over roughly a week, during this time they slowly started to improve and to think more about what it was that they were saying. The goal of this focus on emotional/social sustainability is to prepare my students to be people who respect and are respected by their colleagues so they can contribute positively to workplace culture.