Dijana Alic, Scientia Education Academy Fellow

Associate Professor
Dijana Alic

Built Environment
UNSW Art, Design and Architecture

 

Dr Alic is the Associate Dean Education at UNSW faculty of Built environment, and teaches design, history and theory in architecture.

Dijana’s work centres on themes of social equality, cultural memory and political history as expressed within the urban fabric. As the current Associate Dean of Education, Dijana seeks to promote and foster social, cultural and intellectual diversity in her teaching and research. Dijana’s interest in the interface between scholarship and teaching is ideally suited to linking professional, government and industry sectors with academia and has allowed her to develop numerous postgraduate design and research courses that have connected the university’s educational context to both government and non-government organisations. 

Through more than two decades of academic experience, Dijana has been involved in most aspects of faculty administration and teaching. As Program Coordinator of the UNSW Master of Architecture, a two-year postgraduate program, she worked on the scholarly framework for many courses in the program and delivered intellectual guidance to both students and staff. She is conscientious and dedicated to providing quality education in order to continue to advance excellence in learning and teaching at UNSW. Dijana has a keen understanding of the impact of university policy, and well-honed skills in mediating discussions with multiple stakeholders and stakeholder groups in the professional, industrial, and broader community. 

Education Projects
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UNSW Built Environment (BE) Formative Peer Review of Teaching

Dr Dijana Alic and Stephen Ward, UNSW Built Environment 

Introduction

Scientia Education Fellows Stephen Ward and Dijana Alic initiated a project at the faculty of Built Environment, to extend the UNSW Medicine's Formative Peer Reviewing Teaching project (FPRT) to their faculty. Following consultations with the team at Medicine, the first reviewer training session was conducted in June 2018 and fourteen BE reviewers were trained. The session was led by Chinthaka Balasooriya from Faculty of Medicine under a project funded with a grant from the Scientia Educational Investment Fund. The BE system and procedures largely follow the pattern established by colleagues in Medicine. A BE web page has been created on the staff intranet site – with provision of links for staff to request a review of their teaching and to express interest in being trained as a reviewer (log-in required). An admin staff member has been appointed to maintain the system and its records.  

Theoretical Background: Formative Peer Review complements the UNSW Summative Peer Review of Teaching scheme which gives staff the means of providing direct evidence of teaching practice. UNSW requires this evidence with any application for a Vice Chancellor’s Award for teaching and, from 2019, with an application for academic promotion.

FPRT, on the other hand, is a collaborative and collegial process to support academic development and improvement of teaching, which will assist academics in preparing for a summative review. A key feature of the process is that it will be driven by the reviewee, who retain ownership of the formative peer review documents. In BE, the FBRT process uses the same dimensions of teaching and rating tool as the UNSW Summative Peer review. . 

Aims: The aims of the project are to  

  • Provide collaborative and collegiate support for development of teaching in the Faculty. Support is extended to sessional teaching staff as well as continuing academics. 
  • Assist academics in preparing for a UNSW Summative Peer Review.  

Next steps: The program was trialled in Term 1, 2019. Following this trial, we will launch a campaign to promote the scheme more widely – seeking both requests for review and expressions of interest in becoming a reviewer. Another reviewer training/refresher session will be planned for mid 2019.