8 minute read
Desired Enablers
RESOURCING A FUTURE OF ABUNDANCE
The University of the Western Cape’s outdoor stadium and track needs to be complemented with an AstroTurf for hockey and synthetic football. Indoor training facilities are also needed.
The staff of the six departments of Student Development and Support work tirelessly to ensure the advancement of student’s academic and holistic development. Further enablers (resources, products or services) will allow a department to fl ourish beyond expectations. There are ongoing mid-to-long term efforts to secure these from the university or prospective sponsors. We offer insight into what these desired enablers are and how it would improve student life at the university.
Financial Aid
Desired enablers:
1. Venue with enough space for staff to have for consultations with students. 2. Venue with boardrooms for donors to consult with students privately. 3. New building which is visible and near student administration.
Micheal Kwathsa
Financial Aid Offi ce Head “With all the above-mentioned enablers in place, the Financial Aid Offi ce should comfortably provide our donors with the necessary space to conduct their interviews and also to accommodate staff meetings and a bigger group of students to attend presentations. All the above can be achieved through communication to our DVC Offi ces in assisting with our plans and also with the fi nancial aspect in reaching our goals.”
Offi ce for Student Development
Desired enablers:
1. Upgrade current Careers Service
Management (CSM) software, UWC
Career Xplora portal, to the CSM
Enterprise Solution. Licencing cost for two years is estimated at R300,000. 2. Redesign the Careers Service Offi ce to include two interview rooms for consulting and recruiter interviews and one soundproof virtual interview room
for students to use to conduct mock interviews or attend formal virtual interviews in a safe and quiet space. 3. Provision of mobile data to students and graduates to assist in their job search. 4. Provide students with a customised and structured job search experience based on their career or disciplinespecifi c needs and embed job search preparation activities into the curriculum using technology.
Nazrana Parker:
Careers Service Coordinator “These desired enablers will provide our students with an enhanced job search preparation experience available 24/7/365 during their academic career, allowing them to be prepared for the rigours of the job search and reduce the time frame between graduation and landing their fi rst job. It will also provide recent alumni online access to careers service resources for a minimum of three years after graduation, thus increasing the rate of graduate employment of our students.”
Residential Services
Desired enablers:
1. An appropriate monitoring and evaluation software system for managing incidents in residences, as these directly impact students’ experiences of a living-learning environment. This system is to be underscored by the value placed on the rights of all community members. 2. Additional human resources in order to have a dedicated, comprehensive service in the area of Private
Accommodation. 3. Additional student housing. 4. Funding towards targeted, sustained psycho-social programming aimed at shifting attitudes and behavior.
Gretna Andipatin
RS Residence Life Manager “It goes without saying that one of the most obvious needs in student housing, are additional beds for students, specifi cally in light of the vast amount of current and prospective student accommodation applicants we receive year on year.”
“We also all want to infl uence change when it comes to addressing social ills in society. We are best placed to capacitate the leaders of tomorrow in areas pertaining to Mental Health, GenderBased Violence and other fundamental human rights issues, so that they become global agents of change.”
“Current strategies are impassioned eff orts, that would better serve if they were more sustainable and implemented over more protracted periods of the academic life-cycle of the student, and through their own continued eff orts beyond. Fostering a human rights context goes hand-in-hand with the former, which makes credible, effi cient and transparent processes in the management of Community Standards a necessary area for focus.”
Sport Administration
Desired enablers:
1. An indoor sports facility 2. A hockey AstroTurf 3. A synthetic surface football fi eld 4. Increase in sports scholarships 5. Vehicles
Mandla Gagayi
Sport Administration Director “All these enablers will go a long way in enhancing our students’ competitiveness. An indoor sports facility will enable us to attract elite student athletes to ensure that we remain competitive. Our netball and basketball teams play at the highest level of student sport without having an indoor centre. Having that facility would defi nitely make us the best in the country. Furthermore, an indoor centre would contribute to the academic programme by providing much needed fl at space for exams and graduation ceremonies, including hosting of conferencing and other national and international events.”
“Having synthetic sport surfaces will also allow our teams to train and play throughout the year without having to worry about drought and bad weather.”
“Scholarships are needed to ensure that elite student athletes are recruited and retained to UWC until they achieve their degrees while also participating in elite sport. Many student athletes do not have fi nancial means to remain at university because they come from poor families. Giving them scholarships will ensure that they get a chance in life, even if they do not make it through sport. raveling forms a biggest part of sport. As such it is important for the university to have safer mode of travel for students. Transport is also required to cope with ever-growing number of students that play sport.”
Our netball and basketball teams play at the highest level of student sport without having an indoor centre. Having that facility would defi nitely make us the best in the country.
Desired enablers:
1. Additional professional counselling staff members to improve the student-counsellor ratio and respond to the continuing increased demand for counseling. 2. Resources (human and fi nancial) to focus on preventative care in student mental health and wellness, such as campus wide psycho-educational projects and programmes, instead of the reactive curative response that we are currently forced to do. 3. The addition of a psychiatrist as a consultant on an ad-hoc basis to assist with psychiatric referrals.
Rone Gerber
Therapeutic Services Manager “The demand for counseling services at UWC far exceeds the available resources. Timely counseling interventions may prevent the development of serious mental health issues as well as have a direct impact on a student’s ability to perform optimally academically – decreasing the risk of attrition.”
“Early, preventative interventions may reduce the need for seeking professional counselling services that are already scarce and allow students to have agency in their own mental health and wellness management. The public health system is also experiencing a serious shortage of mental health care services, with the result that students without medical aid often have to wait for months to receive proper psychiatric assessments and medication for their mental health challenges. Many students drop out of university as they are not able to cope with their mental health challenges and the academic demands, a situation that can be prevented with timeous and appropriate professional early interventions.”
Desired enablers:
1. Resources to design and roll-out a predictive analytical tool with capacity to provide students with personalised feedback on their academic strengths and needs. 2. Training academic coaches in pertinent learning analytics and learning skills. 3. A knowledge hub equipped with computers, online electronic boards and digital tools to stimulate group work, knowledge sharing and host subject-specifi c learning colloquiums.
Dorothea Hendricks
Offi ce for Academic Support Manager “Institutional feedback to students is usually based on quantitative assignment, test or examination data. Personal feedback would provide students with the engagement tools, based on their own input, learning expertise input and crafting the X Factors each student could work on to excel. This could have capacity for roll-out to the whole campus. Academic coaches will scaff old the content work in lecture rooms. Our learning coaches and experts would be able to stimulate experiential ways with knowledge, in our venue, role modeling and activating curiosity in this amazing potential the brain has to learn.”
“We need a strategic plan developed as well as the resources to train and contract the relevant people to augment our current staff ’s work. We will need at least R11-million per year for fi ve years and an additional R18.5-million for our proposed knowledge hub.”
Desired enablers:
1. Transport services adapted specifi cally for persons with disabilities to assist students in their daily student life. 2. Psychometric, neurological, and physical disability support professionals to provide in-house ongoing assistance and support, i.e. occupational therapist. 3. More current assistive devices and programmes for disability learning needs.
Verushka Daniels
Offi ce for Students with Disabilities Manager “Transport will help to alleviate students’ existing problem with forfeiting their disability-related care appointments or daily functioning needs such as grocery shopping, which would then give them better quality of life as a student with a disability juggling to stay afl oat in a challenging student environment. Professionals with the aforementioned expertise would enhance the service we provide to students by adding a more holistic approach to students with disabilities as a buff er to the disadvantage such students generally experience due to systemic issues.”
“The proposed devices and programmes would enhance students’ academic learning ability and performance. These enablers would assist us in our endeavours to become more ethically accountable for the services we render to students with disabilities and acknowledging their intense bravery and courage to enroll for tertiary education in a landscape which is not yet properly equipped for their educational needs.We are advocating for attitudinal change towards persons with disabilities at UWC by off ering them a service which would add real value to them.”
Centre for Student Support Services: Offi ce for Leadership and Social Responsibility
Desired enablers:
1. Corporate sponsorships and partnerships in support of our work in food security, gender equity/ transformation advocacy and volunteerism. 2. Facilitation resources, marketing material and printed media about our work. 3. Audiovisual equipment.
Garth van Rooyen
Leadership and Social Responsibility Manager “Sponsorships would allow us to enhance our footprint and increase our reach to the campus community as well as the surrounding feeder areas around UWC, which the department serves.”
