DR Sandy O’Sullivan

Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) 1993

Sandy_O'Sullivan

The wheel has turned full circle for UOW graduate Dr Sandy O’Sullivan.

A high school drop-out at age 13, Dr O’Sullivan has become the first indigenous academic to be awarded an Australian Teaching and Learning Council (ATLC) Fellowship.

Dr O’Sullivan is Manager, Online Presence, at the Batchelor Institute for Indigenous Education, and her ATLC Fellowship project is to explore ways to encourage and enable indigenous students to undertake research.

Helping indigenous students achieve academically has become her life – sparked by her own experience and the assistance she received from UOW’s indigenous education unit when she enrolled in her first degree course two decades ago.

Dr O’Sullivan remembers that she felt “out of place” and more than a little overwhelmed when she began her Creative Arts (Fine Arts) degree at the University of Wollongong in 1990, aged 24.

A member of the Wiradjuri Nation of western NSW, she had dropped out of school at age 13 and was making her first tentative steps into the world of higher education as a mature age student.

“I decided to tackle university on a whim, looking for a better career path. But I felt so out of place … I didn’t even know how to write an essay,” she said. “I thought: ‘I’ll never be able to do this’ … but the people in the indigenous unit really helped me, and I was able to immerse myself in my course. It ended up being great fun … a terrific experience … so I feel very fondly about my student experience at Wollongong.”

After graduating, Dr O’Sullivan spent two years teaching multimedia subjects at UOW. She then moved to the Middle East, teaching communications technology at the Dubai Women’s College for three years, before returning to Australia to teach media/arts at the University of Newcastle.

While at Newcastle she completed her PhD in Fine Art, and became involved in teaching indigenous art subjects – igniting a passion that has found its true home at the Batchelor Institute, which she joined in 2006.

The Institute has campuses at Batchelor, Alice Springs, Darwin and Katherine in the Northern Territory, and around 40 annexes at other locations in the Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It offers BA courses in Arts, Creative Writing, Language and Linguistics, Bachelor of Education, Bachelor of Applied Science (Community Nutrition), Bachelor of Nursing, Master of Indigenous Knowledges and Doctor of Philosophy.

The Institute also conducts research in the areas of indigenous education, early childhood studies and language maintenance. Under her ATLC Fellowship, Dr O’Sullivan is developing a program that focuses on increasing indigenous participation in research programs through alternative dissemination processes.

“We are developing a suite of resources to help people access alternatives such as on-line methods of participating in research, as a way of increasing indigenous participation,” Dr O’Sullivan said. “There is so little research being done by indigenous students, and we feel it is very important to increase the participation rate, to get more people getting relevant outcomes for their PhD research and get more indigenous graduates at a really high level.” NH
Last reviewed: 13 July, 2009