MY FIRST BLOG! - Lead & Change: Higher Education

Hello everyone - hope you're all well and having a lovely summer!

Myself, Luke and Pauline are going to try and create blogs as frequent as possible so that you're able to keep up to date with what we are getting up to, what campaigns we are running and how far along we are with our manifesto points!

At the start of this week I set off on my way to the University of Lincoln for the first Lead & Change conference of the year hosted by NUS. If the somewhat 5 hour journey from Chichester to Lincoln on my own wasn't daunting enough, the never-ending surprise of cancelled and delayed Southern Rail services and the 'big hole' at London Bridge causing absolute mayhem made my journey a collective 19 hour trip one way due to it taking nearly 7 hours just to get to London, then having to stay in London that night to get up at 5:45am to make it to Lincoln in time - but it was all worth it!

Lincoln Students' Union (capacity of 3000 people)

A lovely, awkward, ice-breaker selfie.

Once we arrived we were given a very welcoming speech by the NUS staff and put into our tutor groups for the rest of the week. I was fortunate to be placed in the lovely Katie Shaw's group who had a very inspirational but chilled, cool way of delivering her sessions which made them extremely enjoyable - even the ice breakers which usually makes my soul shiver with awkwardness, especially when they're blanketed with different terms such as 'Mission; Impossible' to make you believe that they aren't ice breakers when they evidently are! However they were rather enjoyable as they weren't the same old rodeo they usually are but were a series of challenges to complete as a team. My challenge that I had to complete was to come up with a team name, take a selfie of the team and tweet it with the hashtag of the team and #NUSLEADCHANGE. I decided to call our team #TeamHeatwave as the weather was ridiculously hot and in the photo I looked like a hot, sweaty mess well traveled young woman who had dealt with copious amounts of stressful travelling hours on extremely hot trains prior to the selfie.

After the 'organised fun' as Steph from Plymouth Students' Union would say, over the next few days we tackled some challenging topics, listened to everyone's stories and backgrounds and looked into how to become the most effective elected student leaders possible.

The view from outside the buildings of our workshops

My "privilege" beads.

The session that hit home the most was about liberation (Liberation is a term used for freedom from limits on thought or behaviour). The session began with us being given a piece of string and 5 sheets of statements spread out across the room - the task was to read each statement on the pieces of paper and if you had never suffered from the statement then you had to put a bead on your string. The more beads you had at the end, the more privileged and liberated you were within society. It was extremely eye-opening and made us all more respectful of each others backgrounds and walks of life as we compared how "privileged" we were and openly shared stories where we felt empowered/dis-empowered which was interesting and became the highlight of my week. 

Leadership was a key topic among the week of workshops, we spoke about all different kinds of leaders from Zoella to the idiot Donald Trump and discussed how they're effective, what kind of following they have and how their values shape their leadership. This lead onto Schwartz (1992) theory of the value and belief framework shows how specific values may be categorised into what kind of person you are, my top 5 values categorised me into self-direction and achievement which I hope I can portray in the work I do in this forthcoming year. 

The view adjacent to the Students' Union

We looked at our values on the following terms which were access and admissions, learning and teaching, quality and complaints and retention and success. It was interesting to see how we all viewed these topics and how we defined them, our definitions were somewhat the same but differed slightly as different elected VP education's had different priorities when it came to these topics which were dependent on the core values behind their manifesto points for the year. My definitions were the following:

Access and admissions:

"Open equally to every single person e.g. low income background students/international students etc."

Learning and teaching:

"Accessible and high quality for everyone including equal opportunities, chances and development for all."

Quality and complaints:

"To ensure the quality is consistent and complaints are dealt with appropriately and effectively." 

Retention and success:

"Should be a high priority and to continually develop the university for students needs."

Through these definitions I want to promise that I will represent as many students as humanly possible to make sure everyone is treated fairly and equally within the academic context. We also had an in depth discussion about what we will prioritise this year - myself, Luke and Pauline will work tirelessly towards our manifesto points, they may not happen straight away but I can guarantee that there will be progress on them by time our roles end and this progress will be documented through the medium of these blogs. 

Our balloon tower!

Along with the fun, innovative ways that sessions were delivered, there was also some more 'organised fun' in the evenings. The first activity was the crystal maze which was a game show in the 90's, I was skeptical of how they'd simulate this within the facilities provided and I was right to be skeptical as the NUS staff in charge openly admitted to not knowing what the crystal maze was and hadn't heard of it before she was asked to organise it for us! It was fun nonetheless, full of different types of games to challenge us mentally and physically. We all made it through to the final (#equality) and the final challenge was to build the tallest tower with balloons, paper and masking tape. For some reason it deemed to be a challenging, mind-boggling task for every other team but mine (obvs my team was the best) as we absolutely smashed it! Other organised fun included a pub quiz with my fellow team Quiztina Aguilera and karaoke. I had an amazing time meeting new people, finding out about how they had achieved their manifesto points to help me make a solid plan for mine!

The coolest and most inspirational part of the conference was the Skype call we had with the co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Patrisse Cullors explained how Black Lives Matter started and has been running successfully for 3 years. However it seems that the awareness of this activist movement only comes to light after a horrific racism act has taken place, it shouldn't take a killing for us to support a group that are fighting for rights that we all should have. We all know that it's happening but for some reason it doesn't seem real until a racism act has been executed. We should be actively supporting movements like this to achieve the equality this world deserves and as Patrisse very rightly said to us "I won't see all the change in my lifetime but I will be on the right side of history." 

For more information about #BlackLivesMatter then please visit: www.blacklivesmatter.com

For more information on what NUS can do for you then please visit:

www.nus.org.uk

If you want to contact me with any questions or queries then please don't hesitate to email me on:

suvpeducation@chi.ac.uk

If you actually managed to get through reading this whole blog then give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve it after reading through my waffling!