Co-authored by Cale Bain and Christina Brauer
UTS Shopfront is the longest running cross-faculty, university-community engagement program of its kind in Australia. Housed within the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, we provide a pro bono service that brings together community organisations with the skills and expertise of students and academics at UTS. We partner with faculties to:
- connect community-led projects to student and academic expertise
- develop civic-mindedness in students, providing both broad and tailored learning content including guest lectures and online modules
- support and promote engaged teaching and learning through our own expertise and networks.
Through Shopfront, students respond to community identified needs and challenges, taking on the role of external ‘consultants’ who work in small teams on project briefs, providing expertise and skills to address organisational capability gaps. All Shopfront programs are curriculum-embedded and aligned with the UTS WIL Framework.
Modules making good on commitments to social justice
From the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion perspective, we at the Community Engaged Learning Team (CELT) have been working towards building some guiding Civic Graduate Attributes, in support of UTS’s primary commitment towards social justice and inclusion. We’re building a series of modules around our team’s collective community engagement experience and expertise, to supplement and work in conjunction with subjects that embed an understanding of working with the third sector.
As part of the Shopfront program, we’ve already been ‘inside’ UTS subjects, lecturing and workshopping students within curriculum around the nature of the not-for-profit sector, stereotypes, and cultural humility. We’ve been so lucky to have Christina and the Learning Design & Technology (LDT) team from the Education Portfolio working with us to make the content come to life so well on Canvas, helping the material make sense in multiple settings so that coordinators and teaching staff can either plug-and-play the material into their courses, or use the material as they see fit.
CELT is building further modules around effective community engagement and research in a colonial context in Australia, and we’re supporting the Indigenous Teaching and Learning team on a module in support of the Indigenous Graduate Attribute. We’re also looking at how subjects use their faculty’s graduate attributes in their CILOs so we can go beyond course-embedded modules to have community engaged practice and civic mindedness sit within assessments. It’s our not-so-subtle way of making good on UTS’s commitment to social justice and inclusion.
Cultural humility, at your own pace
To develop the modules, the Learning Design team collaborated with Shopfront to clarify desired outcomes and explore how to transform existing workshop slides into engaging, interactive online content. Through this collaboration, it became clear that out of the three modules, the Cultural Humility module posed unique learning design challenges due to its self-paced structure and sensitive topic, requiring an intentional and nuanced approach.
Without assessment or direct lecturer support, the module needed to be engaging and dynamic to keep students motivated. To support their exploration of potentially challenging reflections, we focussed on creating a warm, non-threatening tone, using colourful visuals, playful language, and workbook-style activities. Complex concepts were made accessible through hands-on learning experiences. For example, the Cultural Humility Muscle Quiz functioned as a personality-style self-check, introducing key skills while prompting students to reflect on their own strengths in this area. The module culminated in a carefully scaffolded activity, guiding students through the process of writing a positionality statement, ensuring they could apply their learning in a meaningful way.
Find out more and get involved
Shopfront currently partners with UTS Business School, and the faculties of Design, Architecture and Building (DAB), Engineering and IT (FEIT), and Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). If you would like to find out more or get involved in Shopfront projects, you can find out more on the Shopfront Sharepoint site, where you can also access a short preview of the new Canvas modules.
If you’re interested in partnering with us, fill out the expression of interest form and we will respond with the range, possibility and availability of support. Have a question? Email us at shopfront@uts.edu.au