Continuiing to renovate and decoarate The Treehouse

The Children's Voices Centre moved into The Treehouse (Building 1451 on the Bathurst campus of Charles Sturt University) in June 2025. Over the past few months we have worked hard to renovate and decorate the building to become a welcoming space for children, families, professionals, and researchers.

Last week at The Treehouse we hosted our first research event for children:  the children's advisory panel for our  Children Draw Health. This week we hosted our first event for professionals: Professor Lynn Williams' workshops.

We have just received a new refrigerator, new AV equipment, new bathroom taps, and boxes of books to go into my office. The renovation continues.

The Beehive for visiting scholars

The Billabong includes Lorraine's office

We look forward to updating our kitchen

Lorraine found our new refrigerator

 

Welcome A/Prof Kathy Cologon as Associate Director, Children's Voices Centre

The day finally has arrived! We are so excited to welcome A/Prof Kathy Cologon as Associate Director and our colleague in the Children’s Voices Centre. We  look forward to all of the wonderful things we will do together to make a difference in children’s lives around the world. Welcome!

Sharynne, Kathy, Tamara and Lorraine at The Treehouse

The billabong rug arrived while Kathy was visiting The Treehouse this week

Kate Margetson concludes her postdoc (in Greece)

Kate Margetson has worked with me 2 days a week for 18 months on her postdoc - which concludes now. Her postdoc was funded by a Commonwealth grant to the Rural Health Research Institute.

It has been a VERY productive time focusing on supporting speech-language pathologists to work with multilingual children in unfamiliar languages.

The end of Kate's postdoc coincided with the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) conference in Patras, Greece. Kate presented two papers from her PhD and postdoc and had so many opportunities to network and plan the next steps of her research journey. 

It has been such a privilege to work with Kate and learn from her. I am glad she has a continuing position as a lecturer in the speech pathology course at Charles Sturt University so that we can continue to collaborate as colleagues.

Kate presenting work from her postdoc at ICPLA

Kate and Sharynne in Corinth on the way home from ICPLA

Helen Blake, Sharynne  and Kate Margetson at the ICPLA conference dinner

Kate Margetson discussed the SACHL with the President of the International Phonetics Association (IPA)

Children's Voices Centre staff gathering

This week was the first time that all of the Children's Voices Centre (CVC) staff were able to come together in one place to dream and plan for the future. The CVC staff are: 

• Director: Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod 
• Associate Director Workforce and Policy: A/Prof Tamara Cumming (0.7 FTE)
• Associate Director Children, Families and Communities: A/Prof Kathy Cologon (to begin July, 0.8FTE) 
• Research Manager: Dr Carolyn Gregoric (0.6FTE)
• Senior Administration Officer: Lorraine Bennett (0.5FTE)

We began on Waluu (Mt Panorama) acknowledging country and learning from one another. 

We spent two days talking and planning assisted by David McLeod and Dr Ros Cox. We developed our purpose and mission statement and discussed our communication strategy.

PURPOSE: A world where all children’s perspectives are recognised, valued, and amplified.

MISSION: The Children’s Voices Centre

• Amplifies all children’s perspectives and the right to communication. We do this through quality transformative interdisciplinary research that has global impact.
• Grows researchers’ capacity to undertake impactful innovative research with, for, and about children through genuine collaborative opportunities.
• Together with children, the Children’s Voices Centre
• advocates, informs, and influences stakeholders and organisations to improve policy and practice.
• partners with families and communities for recognition of children’s voices and rights.
• creates practical evidence-based resources to assist stakeholders to provide space, voice, audience, and influence for children’s voices.

David McLeod leading our discussion about the CVC vision and mission

Kathy, Sharynne, Tamara, Carolyn and Lorraine

A/Prof Kathy Cologon

Dr Carolyn Gregoric

Sustainable Development Goals - Contributions to CSU's report

Charles Sturt University has just released their Sustainability Development Goals Report. The report highlights the university’s continued commitment to environmental and social sustainability.

Here is the CSU media release: https://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/charles-sturt-university-releases-sustainability-development-goals-report

Here is the report: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/files/552252729/M3125_SDG_REPORT_2023_WEB_FINAL_VERSION_2.pdf

We are featured on pages 18 and 67

Charles Sturt University media announcement of the Children's Voices Centre

Today Charles Sturt University has announced the Children's Voices Centre via a media release:

https://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/new-research-centre-champions-childrens-communication-rights

This is a very exciting milestone and gives us great direction for our research with and for children from 2025-2027. Our new centre focusses on children, families, professionals, workforce and policy – and is truly interdisciplinary with members across all three faculties. 

 

RED Award for Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Group

The  Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Group won the CSU RED Award for Research. We received the following email:

Good morning,
 
You are receiving this email because you have a team member who has been awarded a 2024 Charles Sturt Excellence Award.
 
The 2024 Charles Sturt Excellence Awards received 94 nominations across our four strategic categories.  The quality of the nominations was high in 2024 and we would like to congratulate not only our winners, but everyone who played a role in the Awards.
 
Log in to RED to see an overview of our winners here: Introducing RED | RED

Kind regards,

The RED Team
Recognising Excellence Daily
Division of People and Culture

Here is the award information

What is the nomination for:
The Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Group (ECIR) is an inspiring productive research group with global impact. ECIR collaboratively builds research capacity, profile and track record of ~50 early-mid career researchers and higher degree research (HDR) students by providing research mentoring and opportunities via an internship model using co-design and knowledge creation. ECIR increases research capacity for engaging in transformative research regionally, nationally, and internationally through interdisciplinary projects, such as the Children Draw Talking project presented at four 2024 conferences, including the International Conference on Sustainable Development (New York). The bi-annual Early Childhood Voices Conferences (to be held in November 2024) already has 620 registrations from 45 countries and 150 peer-reviewed presentations. ECIR supports members to write grants and publications, present at conferences, apply for promotion and publish from their PhDs. By engaging with ECIR members and activities, early career researchers have competitive CVs ready to apply for promotion and grants.

Why is this Excellence Award worthy?
ECIR has demonstrated sustained excellence in impactful research and support for researchers and HDR students during the Sturt Scheme funding period (2021-2024). ECIR members edited and co-authored 12/18 chapters in the book “Early Childhood Voices: Children, Families, Professionals” published by Springer in 2024 (269 pages). Additional achievements over the past 12 months (to Sept 2024) include books (6 published/in press + 1 proposal), book chapters (19 published/in press), journal articles (28 published/accepted), keynotes/public lectures (10), conference papers (42 presented/accepted), editorials (3), and media (3). During 2024, 2 ECIR members completed their PhD and ECIR members supervised 33 HDR students. Achievements over the past 3 years were recognised in a 2024 CRO impact case study demonstrating impact in policy and practice nationally and internationally, including at the World Health Organization

 

There were four winners in the research category

1. Groundbreaking research in AI and digital health - Dr Mohammad Ali Moni - 

2. Developing and sustaining opportunities for growth in data-science and cyber-security research - Azizur Rahman, Anna Shillabeer, Ashad Kabir, Manoranjan Paul, Philip Charlton, Zahid Islam, Xiaodi Huang, Rafiqul Islam, Michael Bewong, Muhammad Arif Khan, Lihong Zheng, Yeslam Al-Saggaf, Sabih Rehman, Jan Li, Mostafa Dahshan, Tanmoy Debnath, Quazi Mamun, Oliver Burmeister, Terry Bossomaier, Dmitry Demskoy, David Tien, Irfan Altas, Maumita Bhattacharya, Jason Howarth -

3. The Research Productivity Index Project- Samantha Phegan, Josh Kent, Deepa Narayanan, Karen Sinclair, Katie Dunn, John Burns, Helen Stephens, Veera Gogineni, Boram Kwon, Dale Curran, Rory Hock, Emmaline Lear, Lynne Creasy, Latha Bheemaneni, Amanda Shepherd, Samantha Phegan, Josh Kent, Deepa Narayanan, Karen Sinclair, Katie Dunn, John Burns, Helen Stephens, Veera Gogineni, Shyam Mohan, Ben Speirs, Andrew Paul, Simon Eriksson, Jason White, Paul Bristow, Darren Browne -

4. The Early Childhood Interdisciplinary Research Group - Sharynne McLeod, Suzanne C. Hopf, Sarah Verdon, Elizabeth (Libbey) Murray, Julian Grant, Carolyn Gregoric, Josephine Ohenewa Bampoe, Sarah Bartlett, Helen L. Blake, Kate Crowe, Jessamy Davies, Lysa Dealtry, Cheree Dean, Laura Delli-Pizzi, Belinda Downey, Tina Du, Jenny Dwyer, Sheena Elwick, Belinda Friezer, Leanne Gibbs, Kasey Hillyer, Laura Hoffman, Carmen Huser, Marie Ireland, Nicola Ivory, Janine Krecko, Linda Mahony, Olebeng Mahura, Kate Margetson, Cathie Matthews, Holly McAlister, Nicole McGill, Anne McLeod, Michelle Milan, Ben Pham, Azizur Rahman, Arifa Rahman, Mehdi Rassafiani, Goutam Roy, Shukla Sikder, Lindsay Smith, Sarah Stenson, Van H. Tran, Kelly Tribolet, Audrey (Cen) Wang, Emily-Jane Woodhead, Cherie Zischke

Olebeng's visit to Bathurst

It was my pleasure to host Dr Olebeng Mahura in Bathurst this weekend. I first met Olebeng at the ICPLA conference in 2016 in Halifax, Canada. We have kept in touch - and Olebeng co-authored four chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World that I edited. 

• Setswana speech development
• Xhosa/isiXhosa speech development
• Zulu/isiZulu speech development
• English (South African) speech development.

It was great to show her around Charles Sturt University and Bathurst.

Olebeng saw 144 kangaroos at CSU and Mt Panorama
including the rare albino and a wallaby

Olebeng visiting the TRex in the Fossil and Mineral Museum

Sharynne and Olebeng next to the replica of the
largest gold nugget ever found in the world (near Bathurst)

Olebeng in my office at CSU

Olebeng visited The Treehouse

Olebeng is working on a website - SpeechOn - to provide resources in indigenous African languages (Setswana, isiZulu, isiXhosa).

SpeechOn: https://www.speechon.co/about