Storytelling, stats, and helping everyone belong with Andy Perfors

Meet Professor Andy Perfors, Director of the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, and Academic Lead, LGBTIQA+ Inclusion at the University.

How would you describe your teaching role at the University?

I teach third-year Research Methods in Psychology. The subject has about 1000 students, and I teach statistics and programming to Psychology majors. I've been doing that for five years and I'm very passionate about that kind of teaching and its importance.

I am also Academic Lead for LGBTIQA+ inclusion. In that role I work with Chancellery, and across the University with students and staff, to identify what still needs to be done and to facilitate communication and understanding between the University and LGBTIQA+ staff and students. My main goal is to make it so that queer people belong here and feel that way.

Do the two roles intersect at all?

There are surprising similarities between my LGBT role and what I do in my teaching. I teach statistics to psychology students, and most of the people who go into psychology come in worried because they’ve had bad experiences with mathematics.

A huge part of what I do is to create an emotionally safe space to learn. I break things down a lot, give students lots of support and room to ask questions, show them I understand how they are feeling, and give them tips for handling those feelings as well as the content. I want them to know they belong, and they can do stats even if they don’t consider themselves a “math” person. It’s not that different from how I am trying to ensure that the University is an emotionally safe place for queer people, a place where we all belong.

How do you make statistics accessible to even the most daunted students?

This may sound really gimmicky, but it works amazingly well; I teach statistics by embedding it in a story that lasts all semester. The story involves a bunch of stuffed animals who live in a place called Bunnyland. Over the first few weeks of the course it becomes clear that Bunnyland is running out of food. They start to think that it's animals in Otherland that are stealing their food, and they send off animals to Otherland who disappear. There’s a bunch of drama, but in the end they end up resolving it in a heartwarming way by using statistics skills to analyse data and figure out what to do next.

The story is about acceptance, not division?

Right, I love teaching this way. I created the story to make the course more interesting, and to help with students’ anxiety. There’s all this detail in the story that makes people realise that we use statistics for a reason, to be able to properly answer questions that matter.

Content comes up naturally and in a way that really drives home the nuance and importance of it, things like, how do you define your best variables? How do you measure these things? What can this data tell us? What are the alternate interpretations?

In this story there’s a bunch of characters, and they end up serving as proxies for the students to see themselves in and feel less alone. The main character is Bunny and she's very anxious. About statistics and about everything else. There's another character, Foxy, who is basically an immigrant to Bunnyland, who international students often feel like they can relate to. There's also a character who really loves statistics, and a non-binary character, one who doesn’t think he’s very smart, and one who is really artsy, and a comic relief character.

By giving the students characters they can attach to, they can relate as well as learn. I got an email from a student just the other day who said, “The university's so big, it's easy to feel alienated. Bunnyland made me feel seen and that I belong.”

What does ‘good teaching’ look like to you?

Something I realised early on, and this is true about all teaching, is that you cannot divorce good teaching from emotion management, especially at the university level. All our students are smart, and often what differentiates the successful ones is their motivation and drive, and those things are deeply related to their emotions.

A good teacher will see where their students are and meet them there. My biggest goal is to make them feel empowered and confident that they can do hard things that push them outside their comfort zone. Hopefully this helps them to do well in my class and to keep using this learning and do well in the future.

It seems that for you, teaching a subject is not the whole of the learning.

For me, my undergraduate experience really made a huge difference in my life, and part of it was that I felt like university was the first place I felt belonged. So, I try to give students in my subject a place where they feel like it's okay to be themselves. To try things and not be afraid to fail and remember there are multiple paths to happiness. And that it’s okay to be queer, or neurodivergent, or older than other students, or from a different place, or with a different background, or just to be whoever you are.

What’s a simple action you’d encourage other teachers to take to help improve the experience of their students or colleagues?

To not be afraid to be yourself. I passionately believe that it is our differences and our diversity that makes us strong. Every time I admit my insecurities and weirdness, like that I’m a deeply awkward person, it's been really validating, and I've had people say, ‘thank you for doing that’. I think being open about my neurodivergence and that I’m trans has made me better at everything I do. I would love it if we all felt like we were safe to be authentic.

No one should do something they're not comfortable with or disclose personal information if they don’t feel safe to do so, but it would be very cool if more people felt they could. By seeing someone in a teaching or management role be authentically themselves, and by using examples that are inclusive of everyone, these things can have a huge impact.

Find out more about the University’s LGBTIQA+ Inclusion Action Plan.