Leaders and Facilitators
Biographical details of speakers
Professor Tony Watts
Professor Tony Watts is a self-employed international policy consultant on career guidance and career development, based in Cambridge, England. He is a Founding Fellow and Life President of the National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling (sponsored by the Careers Research and Advisory Centre in Cambridge); Visiting Professor of Career Development at the University of Derby; and Visiting Professor at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Tony Watts holds degrees in history (Cambridge) and in sociology (York), and honorary degrees from The Open University, the University of Derby, and Napier University, Edinburgh; he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. A joint-founder of CRAC, he was Director of NICEC from 1975 to 2001. He has published a large number of books and articles: books which he has written or edited include Diversity and Choice in Higher Education (1972), Counselling at Work (1977), Schools, Careers and Community (with Bill Law) (1977), Career Development in Britain (with other colleagues) (1981), Work Experience and Schools (1983), Education, Unemployment and the Future of Work (1983), Mirrors of Work: Work Simulations and Schools (with Ian Jamieson and Andy Miller) (1988), Educational and Vocational Guidance Services for the 14-25 Age-Group in the European Community (1988), Rethinking Work Experience (with Andy Miller and Ian Jamieson) (1991), The Economic Value of Careers Guidance (with John Killeen and Michael White) (1992), Rethinking Careers Education and Guidance: Theory, Policy and Practice (with Bill Law, John Killeen, Jenny Kidd and Ruth Hawthorn) (1996), New Skills for New Futures (with Raoul van Esbroeck) (1998) and Adult Guidance Services and the Learning Society: Emerging Policies in the European Union (with Will Bartlett and Teresa Rees) (2000). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling (which he founded and edited or co-edited from 1973 to 1999) and the International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance; and a member of the advisory boards of several other national and international journals, including the Australian Journal of Career Development.
In higher education, recent reports by Tony Watts include Strategic Directions for Careers Services in Higher Education (1997) and Career Development Learning and Employability (2006). He has recently completed (with Val Butcher) a pilot project on the role of careers services in institutional strategies on student employability, and the implications of these strategies for the structure and role of careers services.
Tony Watts has lectured in over fifty countries, and has carried out a number of comparative studies of guidance systems around the world, as well as acting as consultant to several transnational action projects. He has also been a consultant to various international organisations including the Council of Europe, the European Commission, OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank. From October 2001 to October 2002 he was a member of the OECD staff, working on a 14-country Career Guidance Policy Review (including responsibility for the review on Australia). His recent work has included a study for the European Commission’s DG Employment of career guidance in public employment services, a project for the European Training Foundation on career guidance in the Middle East; and a review of Careers Services in New Zealand. He is a consultant to the European Commission’s new European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network, and a member of the Board of the International Centre for Career Development and Public Policy. He was awarded an OBE in the 1994 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to education.
Ms Belinda McLennan
Belinda McLennan is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) at Victoria University (VU) Melbourne, Australia where she is leading the implementation of the university’s commitment to incorporate Learning in the Workplace and Community into every VU course over the next three years as a key component of an action plan for ‘Making VU a New School of Thought’ which aims to position VU for achieving a distinctive and sustainable future. VU is a multi-sector university providing further, vocational and higher education.
Belinda has been a teacher and leader in higher education for 30 years in various institutions. Her interest is strongly focused on authentic, experiential and work-based learning, for students and for those who work and provide educational leadership in the fast changing post-compulsory education sector.
Currently Belinda is the sponsor of a number of strategic initiatives in teaching and learning at Victoria University including the development and implementation of a Learning Commons approach across the University's campuses founded on a student-centred learning and teaching philosophy; development of the University's Post-compulsory Education Centre (PEC) for researching teaching and learning at Victoria University; an educational leadership development strategy including the piloting of a joint Universities program; the embedding of a comprehensive approach to developing graduate attributes through all University courses; and in framing and developing a University wide approach to emphasise the integration of active learning and assessment with knowledge development for developing graduates who are job, career and future ready.
Dr. Amy Kenworthy-U'Ren
Dr. Amy Kenworthy-U’Ren is an international expert in the field of community engagement and service-learning. She has been an active practitioner, author and trainer in the field of service-learning for over 15 years and was a founding member of one of the United States’ top 10 ranked University service-learning programs (Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts). Her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Bachelor of Science (BS) in Business Communications degrees were awarded at Bentley College.
Dr. Kenworthy-U’Ren has co-edited special issues on service-learning for the following internationally ranked peer-reviewed journals: The Academy of Management Learning and Education (2005); the International Journal of Case Method Research and Application (2006); the Journal of Management Education (2008) and the International Journal of Organizational Analysis (forthcoming in 2009). She has published articles in journals such as The Journal of Applied Psychology, The Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Management Inquiry and The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. She has presented over 35 papers and symposia on the topic of service-learning, community engagement, work-integrated learning and experiential educational practices. She sits on the editorial boards for the two leading educationally-oriented journals in her discipline – The Academy of Management Learning and Education and The Journal of Management Education.
In terms of teaching and education-oriented awards, Dr. Kenworthy-U’Ren has won numerous Bond University (e.g., Vice-Chancellor’s Quality Award for Teaching; Vice-Chancellor’s Quality Award for Service), national (e.g., two Carrick Institute for Learning & Teaching in Higher Education Citations) and international (e.g., the 2006 recipient of The Organizational Behavior Teaching Society’s New Educator Award) awards for her work in this area. She is the former Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning for the Bond University Faculty of Business, Technology and Sustainable Development. She is the current Deputy Chair for the Bond University Teaching and Learning Committee. As part of that role, she is currently serving as a founding member of the Bond Research Centre for Teaching Excellence. She is an active consultant to other colleges and universities, both in Australia and abroad, on the topic of service-learning in the business disciplines.
One of her most recent projects is the establishment of a U.S./Australia Bentley College-Bond University service-learning study abroad program where students from Bentley College will study abroad at Bond University and enrol in for-credit subjects with service-learning (community engagement) semester-long project components. This is the first international service-learning-based partnership engagement project of its type that either of the tertiary institutions has been involved.
Associate Professor Simon Barrie
Simon Barrie is an Associate Professor at The University of Sydney where he is Associate Director of the Institute for Teaching and Learning. The Institute’s role is to work with the university community to research, enhance and assure the quality of teaching and student learning. Simon’s research explores the nature of the student learning experience in universities as well as the academic experience, and the academic development processes associated with efforts to improve university teaching and learning. In particular his recent work has focused on the development of graduate attributes and the quality assurance of university teaching and learning. The conceptual model for graduate attributes which he developed has helped to explain many of the difficulties experienced in response to efforts to incorporate generic attributes in traditional university curricula. The model helps to explain why individuals – be they teachers, policy makers, curriculum designers or students, - have particular beliefs about what graduate attributes ‘are’ and ‘how’, if at all, they should be taught in universities. His model has now informed policy and curriculum development at several universities in Australia and the UK. He is currently exploring the potential of this model to help reshape academic communities, as well as university curricula, to achieve the sorts of high level attitudes and dispositional stances which have so far proved to be the most elusive outcomes of generic attributes curriculum renewal. Simon has led various University of Sydney institutional projects on generic graduate attributes and teaching evaluation and quality assurance, and is an international advisor and reference group member for several large scale projects on Graduate Attributes, Research-Teaching linkages and Assessment in Europe and Australia. He is currently leading a national research and scoping study in Australia, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, which investigates the conceptual; structural; and institutional; barriers and enablers, to curriculum renewal to achieve generic graduate attributes.
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