Developing an inclusive stakeholder consultation process: a case study

One of the two aims of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded Define Your Discipline (DYD) project is to develop an efficient, inclusive, simple and systematic stakeholder consultation process that can be used by discipline stakeholders to define their discipline. During 2010 the DYD stakeholder consultation process was developed and then trialled nationally to develop a draft set of Graduate Outcomes for the environmental engineering discipline. The first part of the paper describes the DYD stakeholder consultation process which uses both divergent and convergent strategies to ensure that the individual voices of the participants are captured, as well as group perspectives. Data was gathered on the tasks undertaken by graduates during their first two or three years of practice. Once the 2010 stakeholder consultation workshops had been completed the data were synthesised to define a draft set of Graduate Outcomes for the discipline. Two different types of workshop are being used during 2011 to refine the draft set of Graduate Outcomes. Throughout this process each outcome remains linked to all of the identified tasks from which it was derived, and the people who submitted those tasks. Thus, the project team can review the importance of the contributions from the various groups of participants (such as academics, graduates and practitioners) as well as some of the characteristics of those groups such as location, and gender. The second part of the paper discusses the feedback received from members of the stakeholder groups who participated in the DYD stakeholder consultation process: 50 of the 110 workshop participants; the project team; and the client---the Environmental Engineering College Board. Overall, the feedback from all parties was very positive. The feedback from the 2010 workshops was used to fine-tune the DYD consultation process for the 2011 workshops.