Indigenous Co-Design and Cultural Literacy with Monash University

Earlier in February of 2023, Native Discovery worked with Monash University Malaysia to host the Engineering Tropical Exchange Challenge (ETEC) 2023 in conjunction with their annual global engagement activities.

We began designing the programme with the idea of creating a meaningful avenue for students from outside of Malaysia to broaden their horizons through travel while applying their skills as engineers-to-be. The Orang Asli community of Serendah were well positioned to the task.

Together, we ran a multi-day programme for Monash University students from both Malaysia and Australia across various engineering fields. Participating students worked with Native Discovery and our Orang Asli community partners from Kampung Serendah with the goal of co-designing engineering solutions for the larger community while increasing cultural proficiency.?

Beyond a typical 'prescribed' solution creation exercise, we wanted participants to first learn to listen and see the local community as they were - for both their strengths and challenges.

The programme was specially curated for 20 students over the span of two days and one night with students staying within the vicinity and traveling to the community throughout the day.

Activities were planned so that the students engaged in strong cultural exchanges between themselves and the Orang Asli, through a mix of shared experiences and dialogue sessions.

These included engaging and relationship building activities such as taking the students on a guided trek through indigenous lands, led by the custodians of the forest - our Native Guides; to having a cooking session where students learned to make traditional indigenous food with our Native Cooks. There were also focused sessions for direct dialogues between the engineering students and community leaders. All these sessions were tailored to bridge the cultural divide, and to preview students to the context of everyday challenges and aspirations held by the community members.?

The idea was by immersing the students in the culture and livelihoods of the Orang Asli community in Serendah, they would be able to learn to see a community beyond the common narratives that exist in academia and the media.

We aimed for students to see themselves not as someone who was simply prescribing a solution to their own perception of existing issues, but more as supporting partners who could work together with community members to come up with solutions that fit the actual lived realities of the community.?This was done by utilising an outcome based approach, where students would work together to map and design engineering solutions with our community partners.

We did so by safely placing students in a setting that allows them to discover the everyday lives and culture of the community through engagement activities and dialogues, to face the same community challenges in regards to resource limitations, governance, manpower, and also perception by the outside world.

The Big Idea: Indigenous Co-Design

Indigenous co-design is a powerful method we incorporated which has increasingly been posited as a way forward in the design of development work with indigenous communities that experience significant inequities. By implementing a programme for students to develop empathy and test their engagement skills with our community partners before creating actual sustainable solutions together, they would be capable of truly meeting the aspirations and needs of the people they wanted to support.

Throughout the activities, we saw participants reach the realisation that some modern ideas and solutions may not be fully compatible with the indigenous community aspirations. As we've ourselves have seen, despite the good intentions of these previous urban developments they sometimes end up causing disproportionate outcomes in many communities.

We wanted to change the pattern of thinking where we commonly end up forcing urban development solutions into a space where it is not meant to be. Truly, we want the students to see themselves not as problem solvers for the Orang Asli but rather – as allies to them who could also contribute to solutions from a unique role by enabling the Orang Asli community to better pursue their goals.

Programme Feedback

After an intensive mix of cultural exchanges, treks through the forest, and mapping and design sessions, students were set to design solutions engineered for the community to take on and implement. The solutions took on diverse forms and ranged from creating income generating ventures - aligned with the culture and livelihoods of the community; to waste management solutions - that can help the overall community address long lasting infrastructure needs.

Each student group had their Orang Asli counterpart who would share their lived experiences and ground the ideas put forward by the participants, which often strongly influenced the narrative of what was the actual problem and what solution would actually be required.

At the end of the programme, students were given the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges made up of members of the Native team, Monash lecturers, and most importantly - the community members itself. We allowed students to take the time they needed to translate their ideas (which were conceived in English) and present it in ways that allowed our Orang Asli partners to understand.

We believe that the programme itself created positive, affirming memories for both student participants and our Orang Asli partners who were involved. While we highlight the many benefits for the student participants, it is also important to mention how the programme is another step forward for our community partners towards building their self-confidence to own positions of power (like being judges) and skills to interact with people of different cultures, language, and backgrounds.

Ultimately, our goal was also for everyone leaves the programme with new stories to tell and valuable memories to share. For some it's about the strength and the ability to overcome real life challenges such as being away from home for the first time and jumping head first into unfamiliar territory. For others, it's about breaking their own stereotypes held before interacting with the indigenous community.

We’ve received a range of great feedback from both the students and Orang Asli partners with the main gist of which focuses on how the programme was able to change students' perception towards the indigenous community and how the programme is able to give these engineering students a taste of real life applications of their skills.

In conclusion, we at Native Discovery and our indigenous community partners of Kampung Serendah are grateful for the collaboration with Monash University. We applaud their commitment towards putting together a unique programme that stands to be the first step towards allyship with the community.

If you are keen to put together a unique educational programme for your educational institution that reshapes cultural perspectives, do get in touch with us and we can curate something that matches your goals. There is always room for more indigenous allies!

Swipe through the gallery below for more glimpses into our past programme ??