Francesca Dominello, Lecturer, Macquarie Law School
I’m just coming from a lecture in family law, parental disputes over children. I’ve been at Macquarie since 2002.
In teaching, I think interaction with students is the thing I care about most. Making sure they’re engaged. Even in lectures, I like the Socratic approach, asking questions. I don’t take a hierarchical approach to teaching.
The teacher is the student, the student is the teacher.
I just had this lecture and a student challenged something I was saying – he wasn’t really challenging something I was saying, I was just relaying what was said in a judgement. And it was a judgement where the judges were divided, and the dissenting judges accused the other judges of being sexist for the way they were treating the mother in that particular case. And the student queried whether it was actually sexism. If the mother was being treated in a sexist way in that case, if there was reverse treatment and the father was treated that way, wouldn’t that also be sexism as well? And I found that really challenging to then try to explain to him why I thought what the dissenting judges were saying was right. And that led to a discussion after the lecture and it meant that I didn’t finish my lecture, we ended up having this debate.
Lucas, Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in Finance, 3rd year
I just take every day as it comes, whatever presents itself is a new challenge every day.
At the moment I’ve had an assignment due everyday this week. So that’s pretty funny. I’m just trying to keep on top of everything and work at the same time.
Being 20 years old, you want to have money to enjoy life, but then you need to complete your studies as well, to move on with your life, so trying find that balance is the most difficult part.
Throughout school I multiple career changes. I started off wanting to be a physio, until my own physio talked me out of becoming a physio. I wanted to become an engineer, and then I realised I needed to be good at science, for engineering, and I hate science, it was the only subject that I failed at school. And I just always had a keen interest in business and finance, and how companies work and stocks and all that, so I want to get in to portfolio management, investing people’s money, managing their superannuation. Hate the study, love the subject.
Judith Clark, Executive Information Policy Officer, University Library
Has anything interesting happened to you today?
It sure has actually. But not at Macquarie. I’ve been on jury service for the last 2 weeks. So it’s been a really interesting experience.
We reached a verdict today. It was very harrowing. It certainly has had an impact.
I think everyone on the jury has been impacted by it, the world won’t really be the same.
The good thing about it was that the jury that we had – everyone pulled their weight, everyone contributed and we were incredibly diverse. So the system really works. I think we left thinking we had all done a really good job and that there is value in what we’d done. I don’t think that’s always the case.
It’s taken me out of the work place for 2 weeks so that’s also a bit difficult.
Coming back to work will be strange for a whole range of reasons, just getting back into a normal world again, I’m really looking forward to it. Getting back into an environment that is… I really appreciate working in the university. What we do is so positive. I think the sheer optimism and productivity that students come in with and seeing that transformation is great. Through that time of being a student they get transformed into someone who understands what scholarship is and they learn a lot about themselves. And I love seeing that and being part of that.
Beaudi, Vegan Outreach Volunteer
(a visiter to Macquarie for the day to volunteer)
We have a virtual reality table set up here showing the life of how animals are brought up. A lot of people don’t know the standards of how animals live. And how the standards themselves are written by the industries, not by a third party. So basically the people running the farms are the ones who make the law. So basically they choose the laws they need to abide by in order to make as much money as they can.
We’ve had about 60 people watch it so far and about 40 people say they don’t want to eat meat ever again and want to be a vegetarian and about 30 said they want to try and be vegan.
It’s all volunteer, we spend our own money to get around.
The VR is the first person view, as if you are the animal. You can look around you, up, down, and you’re with all the other animals too in the factory farm.
And you see them as they grow up, and you see them as they get killed. There’s a video of chickens and a video of pigs. You see how cramped they are, how their babies die underneath them (because they’re pinned to the floor and can’t move) and then cats come in and eat the babies.
Most people see vegans on the internet and how angry they are, and all the arguments. And that gives us a bit of a bad rap. People come up and think that we’re going to be like that. But most of the conversations are really positive, we meet heaps of great people. Generally we change a lot of lives. We get a lot of emails, weeks after going to a university saying, “thank you guys so much, you guys changed a lot for me”.
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