AUT - Outside the Square Academic Team
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Outside the Square Academic Team
Outside the Square is run as closely as possible to a PR agency, with students as Account Executives, and the Academic Staff as Directors. Weekly ‘Work in Progress’ meetings and regular workshops ensure clients’ work is carefully screened.
The AUT staff involved as Directors are:
Aline Sandilands, BA (Hons)
Aline Sandilands is a senior lecturer in communication management and public relations at AUT University. Prior to that she was an award-winning PR practitioner for 15 years, and worked in senior management roles at Otago University and Television New Zealand, where she won an IABC Gold Quill award for the America’s Cup Lucky Red Socks campaign.
Brought up and educated in Egypt, Switzerland and the UK, she has worked as a journalist in print and broadcast both in NZ and UK, and has run her own PR consultancy specializing in film and entertainment. A founding board member of Women in Film & Television, she is also a member of the Film & Video Labelling Board and sits on various charitable boards.
Joseph Peart, MPhil (Hons), BSc, DBA, FPRINZ
Joseph Peart is currently the programme leader in communication management at AUT University.He has been an industrial journalist, magazine editor, public affairs executive with Fletcher Challenge, and account director with Network PR.
He now concentrates on curriculum development and communication research, including reputation auditing, benchmarking, brand-gap analysis and incremental change management. He set up the Centre for Social Media and has been published in two editions of his own handbook of public relations, shared authorship of the new textbook and has written several chapters in other university reference works.
Some people refer to Joseph as the “Godfather” of PR in NZ for his role in professional development and education, for which he has twice received the PR Institute’s President’s Award.
Averill Gordon, BA (Hons), MA, PGCHE, FHEA
Averill Gordon is a senior lecturer in both the Bachelor and Master’s Communication degrees. As a director of Outside the Square Averill works with students to ensure their public relations projects are highly professional and deliver quantifiable results. Averill also runs GlobCom, an international project where postgraduate PR students work in competitive global virtual teams with other students in universities around the world to prepare a global strategy with for an international client. Students then present their programmes to the client at a central location and the winning team is chosen.
Averill is originally a Kiwi and lived abroad for many years. In the UK Averill set up and led the Public Relations degree at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham where, as a Director of Studies she also oversaw the academic rigour of the communications degrees (public relations, publishing, journalism and mass communications). Previously, Averill lived in London where she set up and ran an international division of Weber Shandwick, the world’s largest Public Relations consultancy, where she directed global accounts that won industry awards.
Averill’s PhD research is in global virtual teams and social media. She has recently written a textbook, and accompanying learning resources, published by Oxford University Press (UK) titled ‘Public Relations’ which applies theory to practice.