We have had a number of international partnerships that have taken place during the past year as well as a host of national and international conference presentations, publications, keynote speeches, national awards, and both national and international publicity for Centre-based initiatives. These will be outlined in the 2011 achievements document .
Major Projects for 2011:
The “One Goal, One Community: Moving beyond bullying and empowering for life” initiative has resulted in local, national and international positive publicity for both the LEAP Centre and Bond University. In less than 18 months, the “One Goal, One Community” program has established partnerships with 25 primary and secondary schools in five Australian states (Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia) and in Canberra (ACT), as well as two regions of the USA (Boston, Massachusetts and Tyler, Texas). To date, we have selected our program partners to intentionally represent a variety of school types (with an associated variety of student demographics). We are working with schools that are large and small, urban and rural, private and public, traditional and special needs, day program and boarding school, and traditional open selection as well as one school that consists of only Aboriginal and Cook Island students. To date, over 40,000 people on two continents have made commitments to engage in positive anti-bullying ways through this program.
Externally, our internal management board members have been very active in promoting the activities and research projects housed out of LEAP to the larger academic and practitioner communities. As you will see below in our collective list of conference presentations, keynote speeches, invited talks, and other public speaking engagements, the internal board members have each been exceptionally “present” in the external community sharing the work of our LEAP team with others. As a testament to this, the three faculty members that Robert Stable, Bond’s Vice-Chancellor, recommended to St. Hilda’s School to represent Bond at the first TEDx conference to be held on the Gold Coast were all LEAP members. Drs Jeff Brand, Amy Kenworthy, and Allan Stirling were the three members of the presentation team that were sent to this event from Bond. Their respective TEDx talks can be seen at the following links:
- Dr Jeffrey Brand -TEDxStHilda'sSchool - Facebook Training/Grooming tool for middle of 21st Century
- Dr Amy Kenworthy -TEDxStHilda'sSchool - One Goal One Community
- Dr Allan Stirling - TEDxStHilda'sSchool - History and the Future of Anatomy Teaching
During the period 2010-2011, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of cross-disciplinary projects that our internal board members have both led and become a part of. A number of these projects include more than one of our internal board members as leaders. As the goal of LEAP is to serve as a catalyst and resource for developing cutting-edge research and knowledge generation in the area of learning and engagement, the fact that we are now all actively and publicly “walking the talk” of cross-disciplinary research programs is a fantastic achievement for the Centre. As can be seen in the publications, presentations, grant funding applications, and other work listed below, our members are actively working together to develop new knowledge through research in the learning domain.
Support for our LEAP members has resulted in a number of very strong external research collaborations over the past year. Amy Kenworthy has continued to develop research projects stemming from her work on bullying with the team of faculty members at Bentley University in the US. George Hrivnak and Amy Kenworthy have developed a research program with two colleagues at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (Billy O’Steen and Lane Perry III) focused on values development as a result of tertiary level service-learning programs. George Hrivnak and Amy Kenworthy have continued to collect executive training and development data with their research partner, Brooks Holtom, at Georgetown University. Jeffrey Brand and Amy Kenworthy have leveraged a number of the “One Goal” program school partnerships into data collection sites, with positive (program affirming) initial results (more results to come in October 2011). Allan Stirling was able to develop research connections with colleagues from the Serious Games Institute in the UK (see brief summary below in C5). Jeff Brand has formed partnerships with international publisher Pearson Higher Education, eLearning company Beyondedge and University of Strasbourg academics, all studying learning from serious games.