Welcome! You've reached The WATU Digital Archive for the the subject HUMN 3108 'We Are The University (WATU): Students co-creating change' offered at Western Sydney University, Australia. If you're a prospective Western student, then a double welcome to you! If you happened to stumble here from browsing the web or because someone pointed you to it, please feel free to take a look around.
The first thing to know is that WATU is a university subject, and this site documents and archives the work and reflections of the students (with their permission), and their teacher, Dr Tai Peseta. On the one hand, WATU is a fairly typical university subject. It's a third year elective subject that can be taken by any Western student with space in their degree. Yet, on the other hand, WATU is also quite an unusual subject for many reasons. Here's a few:
1. It was co-created with Western students. That's right. Students co-designed the curriculum of this subject: its aims and purpose, learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and the learning activities - and argued for its approval through university governance. It took us 2 years from ideation to making it available.
2. It's also designed to work in partnership with our University's Senate Education Committee. Each year, Senate Education is invited to propose Partnership Projects that WATU students can choose to focus their assessment on. Members are then invited to judge those Projects and to suggest an institutional pathway forward to enact them.
3. It's transdisciplinary. WATU is focused on an educational problem that requires student-staff partnership as the next investigative step.
4. Students' learning and outcomes are shared with the international community of student-staff partnership practitioners and researchers.
Students are accustomed to sharing their work with their teacher and peers. Not in WATU. Students share, and receive feedback on their learning with the student-staff partnership global community.
While WATU is for any student at Western (it has a 80 CP prerequisite), it's really for students who: are keen to sink their teeth into a project; are intrigued by the idea of working in partnership with staff (or the University) to co-create change; want to challenge conventional wisdom; and develop their curiosity. It will best suit you if your disposition is to ask WHY?
The guide for a 10 CRP subject at Western is 10 hours each week (including class time). Ex-students say WATU is quite a bit of work (reading, researching, writing) for a 10 CRP subject, but that the learning experience is expansive and satisfying. To be successful in WATU, you will need a great deal of internal self-motivation, initiative, curiosity and be able to work autonomously, with the expectation you will develop evaluative judgement.