Fiona Webber Email & Phone Number

Fiona Webber worked in the Academic Literacy (AL) field at Western Sydney University (WSU) between 2014 and 2021. In 2019, Fiona was awarded a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in recognition of her demonstrated commitment to and experience in teaching, learning and the student experience at the tertiary level as judged against a professional standards framework. Until 2021, Fiona was one of the Academic Literacy Advisors at WSU and has worked with a range of Schools and disciplines. In addition to Fiona’s focus on Academic Literacy, she has taught students as both sessional unit coordinator and tutor between 2005 and 2017. Fiona’s teaching and learning activities have included teaching students directly either face to face or online as individuals or groups, designing and running professional development workshops for colleagues, developing online AL resources, and collaborating with, advising, and developing learning materials and activities with and for unit coordinators, to embed academic literacies into their curricula. She also contributed to curriculum redesign of a core first-year social psychology unit (approximately 1200 students). WSU has one of the most diverse student cohorts in Australia, which leads to variation in student readiness for tertiary study, as well as a richness of previous experience. Fiona’s experiences at WSU have given her an appreciation and understanding of the range of perspectives and experiences of both teachers and learners, including that each stakeholder group contains individuals with their own needs, values, and goals. Her teaching and learning approaches draw from evidence-based pedagogy, incorporating active and peer learning relevant to real world experience to engage students and develop a sense of student 'belonging'.