Project Team

Associate Professor Kate Lloyd
Kate is a development geographer and senior Academic Developer for Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) at Macquarie University. Through her role she has contributed to the PACE objective of enhancing community-university relations through transformative learning and teaching, research and community service and engagement.
Kate’s work focuses on a number of projects which take an applied, action-oriented and collaborative approach to research characterised by community partnerships, co-creation of knowledge and an ethics of reciprocity. Through an innovative academic-Indigenous research collaboration she holds an ARC Discovery grant (2014-2016) titled ‘Closing other gaps: Yolngu perspectives on and proposals for two-ways learning to improve intercultural communication and policy.” This work focuses on communicating cross-cultural knowledge to non-Indigenous people and is underpinned by her contributions to a long-term innovative academic-Indigenous research collaboration.
Kate is also passionate about innovative teaching, curriculum development and course design in the area of experiential and work integrated learning. She has developed innovative content to unit material by reintroducing field work to the geography department, developing on-line role plays, running international fieldschools, and co-creating curriculum with international community partners. Kate is currently the unit convenor for PACE360: Ways of seeing, thinking and doing PACE internationally. She has also had experience in curriculum development, specifically focusing on ethical and reflective practice and innovative modes of delivery, and is part of a multi-disciplinary team awarded an Office of Learning and Teaching grant on co-creating curriculum with our PACE international partners in Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, India, Fiji, Indonesia and Peru.
Awards and accomplishments: 2012 B/HERT award for community partnerships, the 2011 MQ excellence in external partnerships award. Co-authored book (Burarrwanga et al. 2013) received honours in the Eve Ponwell Australian Book Council Award.

Professor Greg Downey
Greg Downey is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University. As an anthropologist, Greg has extensive fieldwork experience in Central and South America and in the Pacific, and he has taught the Department of Anthropology’s core curriculum on human rights and economic anthropology since he came to Australia in 2006. While teaching at the University of Notre Dame (USA) prior to that, Greg developed ‘Cultural Difference and Social Change,’ an award-winning, full-credit re-entry course for students returning from international service learning projects, study abroad, and internships in the developing world. In collaboration with Jan Gothard and Tonia Gray, and with support from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (Grant CG10-1549), he produced the ‘Bringing the Learning Home’ curriculum, an open access model curriculum for better integrating study abroad experience into enhanced curriculum at students’ home universities. In 2012, Greg created Macquarie University’s first MOOC (Massive Online Open Classroom), the Open2Study short course, ‘Becoming Human: Anthropology’; and, in 2013, he won the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Macquarie.
Greg is currently developing an anthropological ‘fieldschool’ in Fiji (Anthropology 225) with the University of the South Pacific, as part of Macquarie University’s PACE (Professional and Community Engagement) program. He is a dedicated proponent of open educational resources and community-based and service learning, and has published on these subjects in academic forums and the weblog, PLOS Neuroanthropology.

Dr Rebecca Bilous
Dr Rebecca Bilous is the Project Manager for the “Classroom of Many Cultures” project.
In addition she is also a Lecturer in PACE, working closely with Kate Lloyd to prepare students for international PACE placements. To both roles she brings extensive teaching experience from the museum and primary school sectors, and more recently, from the tertiary sector.
Rebecca is an early career academic having received her PhD in 2014. Her thesis was titled, “Telling and Hearing: Learning from Macassan-Yolngu Stories of Connecting” and engaged with stories that connected Macassan people from the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi, with Yolŋu, Indigenous Australians from the north coast of Australia. The thesis opened up a space for engaging with a multiplicity of knowledges and challenged both learners and educators to change the ways in which they tell, hear, teach and learn from all stories. Her thesis received a Vice Chancellor’s Commendation.

Dr Laura Hammersley
Dr Laura Hammersley is a Research Associate on the Classroom of Many Cultures project. Laura is an early career academic having received her PhD in 2015 from the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University. Her thesis titled “It’s about dignity not dependency”: reciprocal relationships in undergraduate community-based service-learning” explored university student engagement with Indigenous community-based organisations in Sabah, Malaysia, and the Northern Territory, Australia who host students through Macquarie University’s PACE program. Her research interests focus on the intersection between community engagement initiatives and international development alternatives

Dr Felicity Rawlings-Sanaei
Dr Felicity Rawlings-Sanaei (PhD, UCL Institute of Education) is an educational researcher with expertise in intercultural education. Her doctoral research on the internationalisation of curriculum and her more recent research on university-community engagement, teaching practice in higher education and service learning informs her contribution to the project. Her recent book (co-edited with Colina Mason) Academic Migration, Discipline Knowledge and Pedagogical Practice: Voices from the Asia-Pacific (Springer, 2014) explores the parameters of academic migration in the globalisation of higher education in the Asia-Pacific region.

Dr Michaela Baker
Dr Michaela Baker (PhD, Macquarie U) is Academic Director of Professional and Community Engagement in the Faculty of Arts at Macquare University. She is currently a member of research teams working on ethical and reflective practice for experiential learning and holds a grant on innovative ways of practicing and documenting reflection for learning. Before joining PACE, Michaela taught Philosophy, particularly ethics, and worked as an Educational Developer in the Learning and Teaching Centre at Macquarie University, focusing on inclusive curriculum design.

Dr Maria Amigo
Dr Maria Amigo is a social anthropologist with expertise on children in the developing world. She completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Anthropology at Sydney University on child labour in rural Indonesia. She has also conducted research on immigrant children and schools in Australia, and been involved in a world-wide initiative on children and ethnic diversity (UNA Global). Maria has worked for the Department of Sociology at Macquarie University since 2012, where she is the convenor of the PACE unit, Internships in Social Research. Through this unit of study Maria places undergraduate and postgraduate social science students in a range of government and non-government organisations (some of them overseas) where they get involved in small-scale research or evaluation projects. The experience of teaching this PACE unit has expanded Maria’s research interests, which now include University-community collaborative work.

Samantha Gilchrist
Samantha Gilchrist (Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical), University of Sydney, 1998; Masters of International and Community Development, Deakin University, 2002)
As a PACE International Programs Officer for the last 2 years, Samantha has been assisting with the mobilisation of Macquarie University students that participate in PACE International activities. Over the last 12 months, she has also been responsible for the development of partnerships in Cambodia. Previously having worked in the NGO international community development sector, she has been able to draw on her experience of working with international partners to build understanding of the PACE program, and establish tools for activity design that encourage mutual benefit for both partners and students.

Eryn Coffey
Eryn Coffey is the PACE International Program Coordinator and is responsible for the planning and development of the PACE International program. Eryn co-lead with AVI, the review, development and facilitation of the PACE International pre-departure and re-entry programs. Eryn has a well-established relationship with partner organisations and will take a lead role in liaising with them in this project. Eryn also has experience in managing international and local community development programs with a particular focus on indigenous rights and gender equality.