REA Supporting Refugee Students CoP (Q1 2027)

This is our first Supporting Refugee Students Community of Practice for 2027.

Peers, Pathways and Belonging: The Refugee Student Support Team at Adelaide University

Join us to learn about the Refugee Student Support Team (RSST) at Adelaide University’s Pathway College, which employs students with lived experience of forced migration as Peer Support Officers.

Dr Snjezana Bilic (Senior Lecturer, Pathways, and member of the REA Advisory Group) will share how she helped establish the RSST and what it has meant for students. We will also explore the role that enabling and fee-free Uni Ready programs play in opening up access to higher education for newly arrived students.

About the speaker

Dr Snjezana Bilic is a Senior Lecturer in Pathways at Adelaide University whose research and teaching span sociology, human rights and refugee education, with a focus on making the perspectives of culturally and linguistically diverse and refugee-background students in enabling programs more visible. She helped establish the Refugee Student Support Team, co-convenes the National Association of Enabling Educators of Australia’s CALD Student Support SIG, and has been recognised with a 2019 Australian Award for University Teaching and a 2025 UniSA Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.