Ep20: Ronika Power, Bioarcheologist & Teacher

Today my guest is Professor Ronika Power, a Bioarchaeologist and teacher. Ronika’s research revolves around human skeletal and mummified remains from diverse populations across the world. Ronika's team made the cover of Nature for research that was named as one of the Top Ten Discoveries of 2016 by Archaeology Magazine. In this episode, we chat about Ronika’s very early interest and fascination with ancient Egyptian and other cultural artifacts associated with death. Ronika has a broad and quite amazing research portfolio however, the focus of this episode is Ronika’s multi-disciplinary learning and teaching methods and her creative, innovative and inspired approaches to student assessment. Ronika uses a negotiated, student-centred process that involves different ways of telling stories, communicating with audiences and sharing knowledge. That is, creative approaches to communication, learning, teaching, research and problem solving. Students use digital and other technologies - including video, podcasting, infographics, hypermedia and eportfolios - to create narratives, communicate their research findings and to get into the spirit of solving the wicked problems of the world. Ronika offers insights into the hidden and unexpected value of procrastination, failure and of assessments with zero grade weighting. We also explore the profound value of imagination, joining the dots and making connections between people, disciplines, cultures, ideas, and methodologies when looking for and creating opportunities. Links: https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/ronika-power https://twitter.com/RKP_Industries Our urgent need to do death differently | Ronika Power | TEDxMelbourne https://youtu.be/lA_ntn-icwc https://www.archaeology.org/issues/240-1701/features/5117-kenya-nataruk-early-battle https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16477 http://sirkenrobinson.com/ https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms