by Dr Amanda French, Associate Professor in Teaching and Learning at Birmingham City University in the College of Education and Social Work
Stem-power: A British Council, Going Global project which address the imbalance in women STEM researcher progression and leadership by challenging cultures of inequality and generating new ways of working that create, support, enable and secure successful career pathways for women in STEM.
In line with our earlier transnational work this STEM- power project team wanted to create a research space that encouraged collaboration and an open exchange of ideas and experiences that ‘brings to life’ the existing literature on women working in HE in Indonesia. To this end, since our successful project launch in July, we have been working as a group of women researchers based in Indonesia and UK to build a community of practice that will encourage a cross-institutional ethnography based on creative methods that reflects the experiences of women working in Indonesian HE in a innovative and sustainable ways.
We have begun our journey as visual ethnographers creating stories about Indonesian women’s experiences of working in HE with a series of workshops led by Dr Louise Lambert which have been designed to develop digital storytelling skills using ‘Storyboard That’ software. In the first session Lousie showed how easy it is to use the software as well as providing examples from other projects. Subsequent workshops have focused on the visual ‘language’ of comics and the tools and techniques for making comics and using comics in research, which is a growing field in several disciplines such as heath.
Since then, the group have begun to play around with the software and produce their own stories on Storyboard which are then shared on a group Padlet. The stories have reflected on the impact of government policies and expectations about female leadership in Indonesian HE. They have also considered women’s experiences of university through recruitment processes, mentoring and networking opportunities and of course, different leaderships styles. Socio-cultural norms and beliefs including traditional gender roles and beliefs, the conception of women’s ‘kodrat’, and the influence of patriarchy have also featured and been discussed in our meetings. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, stories have also touched on personal factors such as professional experiences and aspirations, family background and support, career plans, confidence and luck!
The conversations engendered by the stories have been funny, lively and thoughtful. The community of researchers assembled through the project are supportive of each other and we are all enjoying the process of getting to grips with a new technology and medium of expression. As we continue to meet we are hopeful that the visual storyboards produced by the group will underpin and expand the other more traditional research tools in the project, the literature review and online survey, by generating new knowledge about women’s experiences of progression and research leadership in STEM which are recognisable to a range of audiences including women academics, students, HE managers and policy-makers.