An exciting new member has joined the EnRusk band!
Since its founding, EnRusk has had a special connection with Australia. Today’s announcement of a new Australian-based teammate makes this connection stronger.
EnRusk is pleased to announce that Sarah Fenton is joining us as an associate consultant! Sarah has been heavily involved in Australia’s education system for many years and brings to EnRusk unique and noteworthy experiences that will be invaluable to our company. We sat down with Sarah to help our community get to know her better and learn more about the wealth of knowledge Sarah brings with her to EnRusk.
“I’ve always loved the challenge of having to figure out how things work that maybe don’t make sense straight away.”
Speaking of figuring things out, Sarah has had a passion for music from a very young age, both learning to play instruments like the saxophone and writing her own composition. Starting a Bachelor of Music, Sarah also wanted to engage her passion for history and showing others how things might work. She decided to become a teacher, earning herself a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Education from Monash University and began working as a History and English teacher.
Sarah quickly discovered that music and teaching were more aligned than she first thought. When discussing music, Sarah said, “I realised that’s how I approached curriculum design and the way that I try to put together learning.” Sarah saw curriculum — like music notes on the composition page. The opportunity to not only teach but to create and play.
Sarah loved her time in the classroom but found her education philosophy was often at odds with the conventional education system; “… I got really frustrated at the way our education system only values the knowledge acquisition you get from school. It wasn’t valuing these young people and the skills they had.” She remains exceptionally passionate about shifting the education system to a more student-centered approach. To pursue her commitment to education change, Sarah took on a new challenge as a program manager for the ‘The Foundation for Young Australians’, a non-profit organisation aimed at giving power to young people. In this role, she had the opportunity to compose her own styles of teaching and created a learning environment that is student-centered by bringing people together and involving students in designing their own curriculum.
Her move into establishing her own consulting company and working with EnRusk is another way in which Sarah is committed to changing the education system and giving a voice to young people. Sarah believes that to truly educate a child, we must first ask how they’d like to be educated.
“I feel like young people are left out of a lot of the conversations that are directly related to them, Which makes no sense to me.”
Sarah brings this fresh and collaborative perspective to our team. She begins with a hands-on coaching role for the Design2Innovate program, that we are currently undertaking with the Victorian Tech Schools. Sarah’s experience using Design Thinking in curriculum development makes her the optimal mentor for the DET facilitators.
We asked Sarah to give us a recommendation of an interesting piece of content she’s consumed recently, be it a book, movie and song etc.
Sarah responded with;
“I just read a book called Song of the Crocodile [by Nardi Simpson], and it just lingered with me. It’s the most beautiful writing and the story just…” at this point, Sarah paused, not wanting to give anything away, she said, “it just sneaks up on you.”
We at EnRusk are super excited to have Sarah Fenton with us and look forward to seeing what interesting music we can all create together in the education space.
