Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I'm kj Karen Jackson, director of Moon Balletic. My genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barma Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill. Giving me my connections to Yorta, Yorta, and Barra language group. There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since invasion, our loss of language removal from country, and our new extinction from massacres and pandemics. The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practices in acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on. I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands, never seeded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit. I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, elders, communities, and families of the Ang Wri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us. Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:01:19 Well, hello and thank you. It's Adam Shoemaker here. I'm delighted to be with you. And of course I want to thank KJ for the incredible welcome to country. As always, the, the knowledge that she brings, the attitude towards what we do and the reminder that we are together walking with purpose at VU in all the places that we work, research, teach, and live is really profound. So thank you KJ for that. I really mean it. And as in so doing, I want to also welcome someone who I've worked with before, elsewhere, but we're talking today about that and this, and her name is Professor Kim Cornish Am Kim is a fantastic scholar, a fan, fantastic researcher, a distinguished professorial research fellow here at VU at Victoria University who started last July, middle of July last year. And believe me, the, the things that she is already occasioning bringing together in this interface between early childhood psychology and neuroscience are really phenomenal. Kim, it's great to have you with us.
Speaker 3 00:02:20 Thank you den. It's great to be
Speaker 2 00:02:22 Here, you know, so we're gonna do some interesting things. We're gonna go on a bit of a journey today because we'd like to know more about you and to, to link it to what you do. But in order to get the doing part Understood, we want to have the you part first. So tell us a little more, because, you know, what was your UK upbringing like and where was it?
Speaker 3 00:02:40 Okay. So I am a girl from Manchester from the northwest of Manchester in a small town called Berry that has a very kinda like unique deep history. I was, you know, where I live and where I was brought up also was part of the women's movement with Emily Panka. So we have some history to where I come from and the role that women played in helped shape our history. I was born in a very working class family in Bury. And the expectation very much, particularly growing up in the seventies and eighties, the expectation was very much that I would, I would go on to do more a factory work or maybe work in a shop. There was no expectation that I would ever go to, to university. And it's, it's not that university wasn't available, which it clearly was. It just wasn't something that my family ever really felt would ever be needed or necessary in, in my family life. So, but I did, I had great teachers. I had, you know, from, from a very young age, a real passion to learn. And so I went into, I went and was accepted to Lancaster University to study politics and psychology in 1985. And found my absolute passion in the field of psychology and in particular in the domain of, of neuropsychology and how the brain functions. And, and it was an amazing period.
Speaker 2 00:04:18 Just a quick one. Often there's a moment when you say you found it 'cause you were in a double major or, you know, double double degree. So when did the politics fade and the psychology rose up? I mean, was there a moment, can you remember?
Speaker 3 00:04:32 Yes, I can. I and, and I had the most amazing psychology teacher, professor Andy Ellis, I still remember him now. And he spoke with us at 9:00 AM we had a lecture at 9:00 AM on a Friday. And I remember he was fascinating in terms of how the brain interacts and has modularity in it, such that memory may be in one place, language in another motor, in another. And for me it was so fascinating to see that the brain can have this kind of like modularity that, that allows when you have one part of the brain injured, the other parts of the brain can either compensate or not. And so that one skill is impaired, but not others. And it was, it was an amazing decade, the eighties for this.
Speaker 2 00:05:19 Yeah. Look and, and a lot of work was done, a lot of research was done. But it sounds like you were getting access to some of the best minds on minds, if I can put it that way.
Speaker 3 00:05:27 Absolutely.
Speaker 2 00:05:28 Yes. Yes. You know, and that helped too. Did what about the research side? 'cause there's a difference between learning about the concept Yeah. And then the idea of discovering things yourself. So were you always someone who was curious about discovering things?
Speaker 3 00:05:39 Yes, I was. So, I, I was still all the way through my undergraduate career, I was always so fascinated by how the human brain can change. And then for the one moment that changed my career or my pathway for my career was when I was doing my PhD at the University of London. And I, I was always fascinated by, by children and how the child brain develops and how it modifies and how it changes with age. And, and I was in a, a kindergarten that was for special needs children. So these are, these were children who had very distinct, quite severe developmental delay. And I remember the teacher showing me all these different children with different types of, of disorder and I could see it how they were learning was so different. It was subtle, but it was so different to one another. And that was the moment I realized that why don't I look not just at the behavior of children, but why don't I look at the cognitive state? Yeah. And that's where it all began.
Speaker 2 00:06:41 It began there. So the playground really matters, right? Looking at people in that kind of environment. Interestingly, yeah, we of course have that very strong Reggio Amelia focus on our early childhood education here. Yeah. You know, play as play-based learning, but not the only thing that goes on. But it is a big thing, isn't it? Yeah. Because people behave differently in that kind of open space.
Speaker 3 00:07:02 Yes, yes. And I think we can see how important play was when the pandemic hit. Yeah. And play was no longer an option for children, particularly in those critical three to seven year age groups.
Speaker 2 00:07:15 It's fascinating 'cause some people went to the extent of putting, you know, swings indoors and, you know, slides indoor homes. They weren't used as much as slides outdoors and swings outdoors. Why is that?
Speaker 3 00:07:24 Because I think the whole, the whole concept of play in the outdoors is where you can actually play with your friends. You can figure out solutions in the open space. You can run, you can fall, you can get up. There's nothing prescriptive about it on the whole, you are there with your friends, you are, you are trying different play play areas. You're trying different ways that you can, you know, figure out problems. You can play with your friends, you can socialize with your friends. It's a very different environment.
Speaker 2 00:07:54 It's a huge thing. Right. Yeah. And we we're sort of fast tracking a bit to that, that period, but let's just go back a little bit to Monash when we first met. Yeah. Because we were colleagues and I was delighted to meet you. I was working more in the education sort of scene, if you like, for the whole Yeah. University. And you were recently arrived having had a Canada research chair before. And I remember you gave me a copy of one of your books on fragile X syndrome. Yeah. So just tell us a little more about that particular thing, that passion. What was that about? How did you decide it? Yeah, for example,
Speaker 3 00:08:23 Okay, so the passion came from after my PhD when I began to look at children with, with various genetic disorders. So there's a reason, there was a particular genetic reason. And, and at the time in the nineties there was a push worldwide to understand how genes hit behavior, how do they change behavior. And fragile acts was one that hired, I had worked with some young children with fragile acts in the uk. In fact, I'd worked with a lot more children. I've lot, I'd worked with dozens of them in the uk. And, and I was looking at how attention is impaired in fragile X syndrome compared to other children. And the, the absolute assumption was by myself and others worldwide that surely one gene can tell us something about one behavior. Yeah. And so, because surely is linear. Mm. So we had fragile X syndrome, we knew that fragile X syndrome is caused by the turning off or by a gene being switched off.
Speaker 3 00:09:31 It's normally carried by women and, and in their sons in particular, if that gene is switched off, then we get fragile X syndrome. And so the worldwide community of fragile X researchers in which I was one with, was looking for what is that behavior? And what I can say now after 25, nearly 30 years, is that there's no gene that tells you what behavior. And what we can do is look developmentally and see how that might be expressed in that gene expression might be expressed now in their behaviors. But it was a journey of 15 years worldwide to try and find out does, do these different genes and children who have genetic disorder, can they help explain behavior? Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2 00:10:17 Enough. Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it? Like the collective and the individual come together. And what's so fantastic about your research, I've always loved talking to you about it, is the way in which it matters to society at all levels, but especially in early childhood, you know, zero to three. Yeah. And everyone I think is starting to wake up to the fact of how crucial that is. Decisions that are taken, the ways people are raised, you know, everything, diet, the rest. I mean, what are we now learning? What's the latest learning that we have about that particular age group that you'd like to share?
Speaker 3 00:10:45 Yeah, I think what we're learning now is that these children are, whether you have a child who has got neuro neurodiversity or a child that doesn't, they are such critical years. We know, for example, and most critical of all is that the brain is so malleable in, you know, just 20 or more years ago, we assumed that at the age of five or six, a child's brain was an adult brain. So it, it was modular, it was, it was not gonna move out of anything. It was very, very similar to a child, to an adult brain. But we know that this is not the case. So, and we also know that, you know, if your child is struggling with, with learning in any way, whether it's attention, whether it's language, whether it's math or whatever that might be the earlier the intervention, the greater the possibility that your child will thrive. So that is the key thing. The earlier the intervention is, and it's not intervention starting at seven. Yeah. To me that's almost the mid-state. Yeah. The start state is as early as possible in development, you know, as early as, as as behaviors or different symptoms are found then to, to interact and to intervene early
Speaker 2 00:11:59 And listening to people who might observe. And they may be teachers, they may be others, they sometimes they may even be family members. It could be someone else Yeah. Who notices. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:12:07 It's surrounding yourself and listening to people that are with your child. Yeah. You know, whether it's, it's like yourself as a parent, whether it's other family members, whether it's the teachers around you, it's to surround yourself and listen to to, to those voices. The one caveat I would say is that I don't know how helpful it really is to go to Dr. Google. I think this is what sometimes happen. Yeah. You know, your child you think is a mom that your child is, is underperforming compared to others. So you go to Google and then you want to see a psychologist and, and you may have to wait, you know, 12, 18, 24 months depending where you are. Yeah. And in that time, no intervention has been done. So, you know, listen to your teacher and listen to, to families and look at, at small ways that you can intervene. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:12:58 Yeah. It sounds to us, you know, one of the things that we're playing with here at Victoria University is the idea of models that intersect, you know, schools on campuses, early c childcare centers in schools on campuses Yeah. Triple sector approaches. So this all happens in one piece. Tell us more about where you think this research research should go and the research with impact and solutions should go.
Speaker 3 00:13:19 Yeah, I I, one of the things that I, I really love about VU within this model is that you've got a, a system where you've got some great research coming and that great research you've done in partnership with impact and industry, whether it's on campus or whether it's in the immediate community. But then you've also got that feeding back into the teaching. So you've got it feeding back into the training of teachers or the training of health professionals and so on. And so that kind of model for me is like a full circle way of how the university has impact and then it keeps training. So it keeps turning around. Yeah. But for me, the, the, the field of my research clearly is early child development in VU offers an enormous traditional, superb way to, to, to really help teachers in training, to help them recognize neurodiversity early in classrooms to feed that back into the schools, to work with industry to work to the, to work with the VU tech schools to bring AI into all of that. So this opportunity to use the interdisciplinary breadth of what VU has the community impact the community in which it's we serve, which is the west. And to bring all that knowledge back to the community, but also back to the teaching as well.
Speaker 2 00:14:41 And what about, we did, I was present at one of the roles when you had principals there involved, what is the role of school principals, not just the cla classroom teachers, how can they assist in this regard?
Speaker 3 00:14:52 Yeah. Oh gosh. The, the, the principles are everything principles, you know, have this incredible job they have to do anyway without me knocking on the door to, for them to help do research. But, but one of the, one of the core features I think now is critical and should be critical, and it should have been critical a long time ago, is working in co-design. So, so principals are the gateways, they're the gateways for their teachers to say yes come into our classrooms. And they're also the people as well that know their school better than anybody. So they know what children, how many children may have neurodiversity, they may know, they'll know the children who are struggling, but they'll also know how their teachers are coping as well. So the research that we are wanting to do and the impact on it is such that everything we do will be co-designed with principals and with teachers so that they also feel that they are part of the research process rather than just the facilitators who never get a mention ever again.
Speaker 2 00:15:55 Yeah, that's right. It's interesting how that works, but if you sort of think about your team-based approach, which is really strong and parents are crucial to this as well, even carers, you know, could be cousins, could be siblings. Do you ever draw a line and what's the ideal size, you know, of a group helping a child, you know, what do you think is the ideal?
Speaker 3 00:16:13 I think those that work most closely with the child, those that are there, you know, as a constant in that child's life. Yeah. So it would be teachers, it would be family members, it may be allied professionals coming in. Yeah. Anybody that kind of like plays a role in shaping the daily life of that child.
Speaker 2 00:16:34 And so just imagine, you know, your health minister or education minister or preferably both. Yeah. What would be the biggest change you could make politically to assist this very process?
Speaker 3 00:16:46 The biggest change? That's a really good question, Adam. The biggest change that I would make is to facilitate and train a whole generation of teachers in this country from the beginning of day one of when they, when they come into their training to understand how early intervention works in the moment in classrooms that are now so full of diversity, just to stop the labels, to look at the behavior and to really make teachers, you know, stewards of knowing what behaviors are in classrooms and the diversity of those behaviors and how to, how to intervene in the moment. In
Speaker 2 00:17:31 The moment. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:17:31 And, and that for me is so important. It's part of what the new thriving kids portfolio will be about is, is working with early intervention in the classrooms. But until our teachers have skills to do that, until they're trained to be able to recognize and be able to interact with that child, no matter what behavior that is, then we are going to continue to see the level of frustrations we see and children not meeting what they, their potential because they're so overwhelmed in a classroom. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:18:05 Potential unleashed is a big thing. So if we're sitting here, luckily we're in a room that's only about a hundred meters away from the largest hospital. Yes. In the state. There's a bridge across the road to the hospital. There, there is a building on the hospital grounds, the VU research building. Yeah. Where you'll be doing a lot of work. What will you be doing that's advantaged by and for and with that proximity to the hospital?
Speaker 3 00:18:26 Yeah. So we're going to be able to build what I've called a living lab. So this living lab is based in the west. It can be based within an hospital environment, it can be based within classrooms, it can be based in the university, wherever your environment to do research is. So this living lab will allow me to, to understand children's behaviors, will help bring in psychology experts, allied health experts, education experts. 'cause they're just across the road from each other. Yeah. To actually come in together to co-design research that can then move straight into the communities in which those children live. So that's the beauty of having expertises in health, expertises in research, expertises in, in, in education, all coming together in the same place.
Speaker 2 00:19:14 All joining through. And look, I, I jumped over some of the labels. That is the career achievements you've had. I'm just gonna remind people, you know, we are talking about not just credentials but things that have contributed to society in three different nations. Of course you've come recently from creating the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Yeah. Monash University. Do you see this kind of inter and disciplinary work between universities as also a big way forward? You've talked about us Yeah. But with whom else? Who else would we work with?
Speaker 3 00:19:40 Yeah, so we've got, you know, we can work with other great univers as well. Swinburne is doing some fantastic work in the AI space and we've got the children's hospital and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. But also what's really important now is the intersectional work between industry, between foundations coming in, between your university expertise, between your sector expertise as, I mean the days of silos to answer big problems that are faced in this world right now will never be answered in a silo. No. You have to bring in, you know, all of the expertises you can in industry and so on. And, and it may even be mean that you step into another university in another country. You know, we know that inter international work, which I've done all my career works amazingly. And it's looking at those opportunities and it's reaching for them and it's bringing them
Speaker 2 00:20:37 In. I get you. And and we're very fortunate at the moment we've got a round of research fellowships Yeah. Around the world. Yeah. We're hoping to have people apply. And do you think that there's any particular nations or perhaps institutions globally that are doing this really, really well that we should be bridging with? Or Indic inviting them in?
Speaker 3 00:20:54 Yeah, I think, I think London, London University does exceptional work in child development and it would be wonderful to get some of the researchers that are part of the university college in London and part of all of the units around London that do exceptional child developmental work. Australia does not do it in the same way that that other universities in Canada or in America do it. We just don't have that child developmental focus nationally that other places do. But looking at, at London, I'm thinking particular maybe Montreal and Toronto and Canada, we've got some great child development units in Boston and other parts in Colorado and other parts of of the us. But I find that working, you know, together with other universities across the world provides unique international funding opportunities. Oh yeah. So even if you can't bring them in, you can work with them and take advantage of global sites coming together
Speaker 2 00:21:54 And you know, the recent announcement of, you know, horizon Europe and you know, opening up that sort of chapter of research possibility. Yeah. You've mentioned industries as well, which often are global themselves. Yeah. So it's really quite, it's upbeat, although the lack is there, the potentiality is there. Yeah. Just as the potentiality is there for the children themselves. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm hearing from you. Yes. It's incredibly exciting. Kim, if you were talking to someone who's a first year student who's in politics and trying to persuade them to do psychology, what would you say to them? This is, you know, given your track record, what conversation would you have at open day to a student who comes and says, I'm thinking I might like to study politics. And you're saying what
Speaker 3 00:22:34 I am saying. I'm saying to them, you know, think about what you want to do in 10 years time. What would you do with your politics degree? And if you're trying to, to kinda look at how the world changes, how behavior changes, how you can make an impact in changing the world that we live in, then then, then look at psych, psychological science. Look at how the brain works, how the mind works, how people work, you know, to, and then see what impact you can make with a psychology degree.
Speaker 2 00:23:10 Well look, I'm gonna go to open day and listen to you saying these very things. I think it's fantastic, Kim. The time goes so rapidly. It does. And we love talking. I love talking with you because I always learn a lot and I think that's the whole point. I went to high school where the, the motto was, ale flaman keep the flame burning. You do that every day of the week. Thank you so much. Thank you for talking to us today. It's fantastic. Really
Speaker 3 00:23:32 Enjoyed it. Thank you Adam.
