Meet the team

Introducing Claudine and Aidan

Kia ora, hello, its great to have you all here and we hope you enjoy the course.

Lets start with some quick introductions.

Claudine Waitere is part of the Professional Development in Adult Learning team who is the lead facilitator of Te Awa Koiora – WINTEC’s cultural capacity programme. She facilitates cultural capacity (providing a traditional Māori point of view in teaching and learning) to staff and local industry partners. She is passionate about this role as it allows her the opportunity to voice a Māori cultural lived narrative about society, for the unification of Te Tirity of Waitangi partnerships within Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Aidan Bigham is a Design Factory New Zealand coach. He facilitates Design Thinking understanding to undergraduate and post graduate students, community organisations and industry. What makes Design Thinking stand out to him is its ability to include every voice and hence adapt to any challenge. This is incredibly important when we have challenges within our countries that effect every culture differently.

So again, welcome and we look forward to travelling this journey together.

You can engage in this course in two ways:

1) You could follow along as we show you an example of Design Thinking in a sustainability challenge – and how in New Zealand we take a bicultural approach. As you follow along you can reflect on how biculturalism takes place (or even multiculturalism) and how you could apply it to your learnings.

2) You could follow along while carrying out your own challenge. This FutureLearn course will guide you in a process and you can apply the same techniques to learn about a challenge from different cultures within your context. This will require a little more work than 1) above.

Whether you choose 1) or 2) we do encourage everyone to engage in the comments feed to get the full benefit of reflection.

Task

Watch the video to find out more about Claudine and Aidan. When you are done, use the comments section to share how formal introductions are done in your culture.