Old Girls’ news

OLD GIRL NEWS

Leading the way for equitable and accessible education

Alice Mander (2017) is a champion for disabled rights. In 2021, together with others, she started the National Disabled Students’ Association (NDSA), which aims to improve inequities and eliminate some of the barriers disabled students face.

Alice, who has Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, just completed her fourth year of a conjoint arts and law degree at Victoria University of Wellington. She’s majoring in film studies and sociology and is in the honours law programme.

Some New Zealand universities have their own disabled student associations. Alice acknowledges the amazing work they do, but she wanted to bring these issues to light at a national level.

“It wasn’t a solely independent endeavour; I had amazing support from other national student associations that have now become NDSA’s partners,” she explains. “We work closely with the New Zealand Union of Student Associations, Te Mana Akonga (the national Ma -ori students’ association), and Tauira Pasifika. NDSA also had incredible support from other disabled student leaders, disabled persons’ organisations, and the tertiary institutions themselves.”

Disabled students are among the most underserved populations in tertiary education. The barriers they face include access issues on campus, difficulty getting accommodations for assessments and exams, and negative attitudes from lecturers. They also experience more financial and social pressures than their non-disabled peers due to costs of living, and challenges finding work and accessible housing and transport. Underpinning everything is the fact that the tertiary education system was built for non-disabled people, and business concerns now rival educational priorities.

NDSA’s goal is to highlight these inequities and to work with government agencies, the Ministry of Education, and student and disabled organisations to help solve them.

“We strongly believe that disabled people are disabled by their environment, rather than their impairments, and tertiary education can be one of the most disabling environments.”

“We follow the philosophy ‘Nothing about us without us’. Disabled students should be leading the work. We want to bring them into decision-making conversations, so our voices are heard. Ultimately, we hope to build an education system that works for everyone. All students will benefit from a more equitable and accessible education.” disabilities, mental health conditions, chronic health conditions, sensory impairments, and neurodivergence.

“We strongly believe that disabled people are disabled by their environment, rather than their impairments, and tertiary education can be one of the most disabling environments.”

At the start of 2021, there were just two disabled student associations, at Victoria University and Otago University. This year, NDSA has supported the development of disabled student associations at the universities of Auckland, AUT, Waikato and Canterbury. It’s also working with students from Massey and various polytechnics to build community at their institutions.

“We’ve had some fantastic wins this year, such as the new tertiary education Pastoral Care Code, which ensures that tertiary education providers have a duty to their students’ wellbeing and safety.”

When she’s not studying or advocating for disabled people, Alice is enjoying student life and her love of the arts. In 2020, she performed a piece of writing with a group of disabled writers, Crip the Lit, at Wellington’s Verb Festival. She’s done stories for TheSpinOff and Stuff to raise awareness of issues disabled people face, and she wrote a regular column for Salient, Victoria University’s student magazine. She’s also been involved with other student groups and had a show on the student radio network.

Talia Pua

Creative

PURSUITS

Talia Pua’s play Pork and Poll Taxes premiered in Auckland in August – a week before New Zealand went into lockdown. It’s the first full-length play the 2016 Dux of Dio has written and directed, and she’s delighted with how well it’s been received.

“We completely sold out a week before opening night, which was crazy!” Talia says.

Set in the 1890s, Pork and Poll Taxes is about the early Chinese New Zealanders who came to Aotearoa in search of fortune, and the families they left behind. For Talia, the most special performance was when a group of 40 poll tax descendants and their families attended her play.

“The energy in the audience that night was palpable. Afterwards so many people approached the cast saying they were touched to see their family’s story on stage. That was really humbling.” The play’s first iteration was Talia’s five-minute monologue for her Year 13 drama internal, a Brechtian piece on the early Chinese in New Zealand. Her mum encouraged her to develop it further and she eventually did after graduating from university. Talia spent 2020 developing the script, which was a finalist for the 2021 Adam NZ Play Award. At the start of this year, she and her producer, Natalya Mandich-Dohnt, co-founded the independent theatre company Hand Pulled Collective.

“We started the company to produce the development season and premiere production of Pork and Poll Taxes, and we’re looking forward to growing it as a vehicle to produce and develop new works.”

Talia attended Dio from Year 1 to 13. She studied drama and took part in many of Dio’s musical productions. Ms Fagan and Mrs Reynolds helped foster her love for theatre, especially devised physical theatre, she says. They also got Talia involved with the SGCNZ Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival. As a result, she directed and performed in a fiveminute piece of A Midsummer Night’s Dream full of devised physical theatre. It won ‘Most Original Concept’ at the Auckland Central festival and earned her a place in the National Shakespeare Schools Production. In 2017, Talia was part of the Young Shakespeare Company that travelled to the UK to take courses with Globe Education and perform on the Globe Stage.

Talia subsequently did a Bachelor of Creative Technologies at AUT. This multidisciplinary project-based degree let her combine her creative interests and explore new areas, including the field of game and play, which she now works in.

“Since graduating, I’ve spent the last two years freelancing as a creative. It’s been a mixture of interaction and play design work, as well as theatre production and performance. I’m still figuring out what I want to do, but right now I’m content discovering and learning on the job.”

Fun and entertainment is one aspect of being an interaction and play designer, but Talia also sees play as a powerful tool for engagement, education and behaviour change. “Because it’s something that everyone knows how to do, even if they’ve forgotten how to, play makes things accessible to everyone. My personal passion is designing for tactile interaction and play, as opposed to using digital mediums.”

Talia is currently contracting with a start-up game design company as a junior game designer and producer. The company focuses on community and education-based games, including a financial-literacy game for teens with intellectual disabilities.

“The arts have been hugely impacted by COVID,” she says. “It’s the same with tactile interaction. We now have to change the way we design interactive experiences so that they’re contactless. The bright side is that it opens up opportunities to develop and push technology in new ways.”

BOOKS BY Old Girls

Last Writes

A while ago I was contemplating the death of my dearly loved mother. I used to call her frequently to tell her what a few of her grandchildren, my three girls, had been up to. Normally, she’d briskly move on to chat about other betterperforming grandchildren, but I know she adored my family. She was warm, generous, engaging and sometimes enraging. Always real, rarely dull.

Before she died, she told me she was writing what she called a ‘death book’. She didn’t bother to dress it up as anything else because it was what it was, and she never minced words. She wanted to articulate what she felt about dying. Mum was adamant that she’d had a good life and wasn’t afraid of leaving it behind. In the book, she choreographed her funeral right down to the flowers and hymns, and included dire threats of disinheritance if anyone spoke for too long.

There were some sentimental things she wanted certain grandchildren to have. She made some random notes and would have written more had she not run out of time. It was still a work in progress when she died. It wasn’t a will, but it certainly reflected her willfulness.

What was unanticipated was the reaction of a number of friends on hearing about the book at Mum’s funeral. The most common sentiment was: “How useful! I need one.” It makes sense to let family and friends know how you want to be remembered, and the final messages you’d like to share when you’re not there in person to elaborate – to address the logistics of passing on, when those closest to you may find the concept confronting and awkward.

I mentioned this to my good friend Rebecca, who is a gifted artist and graphic designer. We decided to take the concept of Mum’s book and put it into a form that everyone could use. Last Writes is a template. It prompts people to think about issues, logistics and legacy considerations associated with dying. It’s interspersed with prints of beautiful paintings by my mother-in-law, a Sumner artist.

We’re not the authors of this book. Anyone who has one in their possession is the author of their own Last Writes. Craft your own story. We hope that people might take some time to give their families the gifts of clarity, candor and consideration in a beautiful little journal that’s both a keepsake and a practical tool.

Penny Tucker (Macdonald)

Visit www.lastwrites.nz and use the code ‘Dio’ to buy two copies of Last Writes for the price of one so you can give one to a friend.

Geraldine Verne’s Red Suitcase is available for sale through Fishpond, Amazon Australia, Book Depository and Booktopia. You can follow Jane on Twitter @JaneRileyAuthor

Geraldine Verne’s Red Suitcase

by Jane Riley Jack had two dying wishes: that his wife scatter his ashes somewhere ‘exotic’, and that she not give up on life once he was gone. He intended to spur her on to new adventures, but despite clinging to her red suitcase, Geraldine Verne hasn’t left the house for three months.

It takes an accident for Geri to accept help from her friends, but when Meals on Wheels arrives, she’s mortified. Yet heartbroken volunteer Lottie brings with her more than cottage pie and custard. Like Geri, she too is struggling to cut loose.

As a gloriously unlikely friendship blossoms, Geraldine begins to feel a long-lost spark of life and a newfound confidence. Perhaps what both women needed most, after all, was each other.

This is Jane Riley’s (Wilson, 1987) second book, following the success of her first novel The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock. Jane currently lives in Sydney where she volunteers as an English language tutor for the Adult Migrant English Program. She began her career in public relations before moving into publishing, and later launched an online e-commerce business. She has freelanced as a writer and editor and wrote a design blog where she interviewed makers and creators.