March 2013


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“I must show you this,” she says, bobbing right up as she sat down. She opens a box lying on the tabletop. It contains a glass plaque; an award from the Cyril Ross Nursery and the Society of St Vincent de Paul to Richard Acosta for outstanding and dedicated service over the years.

“When Richard got this, he immediately handed it over to UWI,” she says. The community volunteer told her that he had approached Student Advisory Services to help with tutoring and since then UWI students have been visiting and helping. He passed on the plaque as a token of his appreciation.

That gesture filled the Deputy Principal of the St Augustine Campus, Professor Rhoda Reddock with obvious warmth and pride. It is one of the ways she knows her Office is doing the right things.

Apart from senior managerial functions and deputizing for the Principal when the occasion arises, the Deputy Principal has complete responsibility for a broad range of matters pertaining to the Campus. Primary among them is student matters. Anything to do with students – development, housing, counselling, health, sport, community services, special needs, grievances, everything – falls under her portfolio.

Richard’s plaque invokes a feeling that her students are doing the right things too; giving time and energy to communities in ways that bring all-round benefits.

Community service-learning and engagement are concepts high on universities’ agendas now. It can earn students course credits and provide practical experience, but it also increases the sense of civic responsibility and awareness among young people.

Two years ago, the Deputy Principal’s Office made a presentation encouraging the wider adoption of community engagement practices in mainstream coursework for credit, which could be the basis as well for community based research in conjunction with or on behalf of NGOs and other organisations.

She is very passionate about these matters which she links to developing students to become well-rounded citizens. It’s one thing to be competent in a subject but you need a broad range of skills to make it in the world, she says, rattling off a host of them: interpersonal skills, self-confidence, critical thinking, knowledge of one’s history … It requires a more regional curriculum.

“I think we try to keep up to date with the global developments in our field and that’s important, but I think we also have to make sure our students are aware of regional thinkers, regional scholarship and our contribution to knowledge in the world, so that we are not just people who absorb knowledge from elsewhere, but know that we can create knowledge and influence global discourses, global innovations, etc.”

She believes it is a question of building what she terms “cultural confidence.”

“I think we have such a poor opinion of ourselves and lack of self confidence that we constantly question what we have rather than seek to develop it. That is why I am very pleased with some of the research that has taken place in the area of steelband innovation and I am glad that UWI has been involved despite some of the controversies, which I hope can eventually be resolved.”

It comes back to rethinking the nature of the education system.

“I really believe sometimes our formal structures remove a lot of the creativity in young people or pushes it to the margin so it comes out in criminal activity, dishonesty, the tricks that we develop… so we have to find a way to involve all the young people we are losing now, who kind of attend school but basically continue to be on the margin of the entire educational activity.”

She talks about criminal activity in and around the St Augustine campus, and feels that apart from the University doing everything it can to beef up security systems, it needs more community engagement.

“It was recently brought home to us with the case from the Faculty of Medical Sciences; that was a horrible experience for the students to be held up and robbed in a classroom,” she said, noting that it was the first time something like that had happened and it suggested a “major transition to another level” that required more than higher level security.

“I think we also have to engage with the communities around the campus so that they see us as partners and not as a sitting duck to be preyed upon. I think the campus has to be much more visible. We look forward to partnering with the communities surrounding the campus in programmes that would be beneficial both to the community and to the university,” she says, tying it back into the community engagement initiative.

“We can do this by research, we can do this by having programmes using some of the skills that the departments have, community service programmes, service learning programmes; there is quite a lot of scope… for example the School of Dentistry’s oral health programme. Also, there is the free eye testing from the ophthalmology programme. These are part of the service learning aspects and I think we need to strengthen that and also our community service and general engagement with communities surrounding campus and we are working towards that.”

By Vaneisa Baksh

RESPONSIBLE FOR:

The Office of the Deputy Principal, with its direct responsibility for the wellbeing and development of students, has direct responsibility for the following departments and units at the St Augustine Campus:

  1. Student Advisory Services (SAS)
  2. Student Activity Centre (SAC)
  3. Halls of Residence (5)
  4. Health Services and Counselling Unit (HSU)
  5. Academic Support/Disabilities Liaison Unit (ASDLU)
  6. Sports and Physical Education Centre (SPEC)

The ODP also deals with student issues emanating from the International Office and the campus security, and has oversight for the Guild of Students and the campus concessionaires.

PROGRAMMES
Co-curricular Programme

As Chair of the Academic Board Sub-Committee on Co-curricular Credits, the Deputy Principal established a Working Group to review the existing co-curricular programme.

The Group submitted its report and many of its recommendations were implemented. A Programme Coordinator was appointed. The co-curricular booklet was modified to reflect the new structure. A number of new courses have been developed for this programme, and a COCR website is up and running.

Service Learning and Community Engagement

Another initiative of the Deputy Principal’s Office was the establishment of Service Learning and Community Engagement on the St. Augustine Campus. In 2009, a report titled “Service Learning and Community Engagement: A New Agenda for Higher Education and Learning”, was commissioned by the Deputy Principal. This report recommended that Service Learning and Community Engagement should be an important pillar in the development of students, beyond the narrow disciplinary focus of their undergraduate degrees. Student Advisory Services (SAS) has been a key collaborator in this, and faculties are being encouraged to get more involved. As part of this engagement, links were formed with several organisations, such as:

  • Angels on Earth
  • Audrey Jeffers School for the Deaf
  • Caribbean Forest Conservation
  • Cyril Ross Nursery
  • Cerebral Palsy Association
  • Habitat for Humanity T&T Ltd
  • Lifeline
  • Princess Elizabeth Home
  • SUMMONS
  • Wild Life Orphanage Rehab Centre
  • Goodstart Mentorship
  • Amica House
  • Friends of the Botanic Garden
  • Adult Literacy Tutors Association

Academic Advising

Academic advising endeavours to guide students about choices they make and how best to achieve them. Academic Advising workshops conducted by the Instructional Development Unit in 2011-2012 led to a survey for feedback on the usefulness of the workshops in academic advising activities the following semester. A total of 1,367 undergraduate students provided feedback via electronic survey on their academic advising experiences.

Establishment of Student Matrix

This student matrix was designed to document information related to student matters and complaints that come to the attention of the Office of the Deputy Principal. This electronic system includes a function that allows regular reports to be produced. A system is also being developed by CITS to input and store data that has been collected by the Office of the Deputy Principal over the past three to five years in a manner that will also allow comparative analysis.

From Student Orientation to First Year Experience (FYE)

The Office of the Deputy Principal spearheaded an initiative in collaboration with the Student Advisory Services and the Instructional Development Unit to implement a new approach to Student Orientation. The first meeting was held in March 2011. This initiative resulted in the development and implementation of an integrated approach to student orientation, in which the Guild of Students, Halls of Residence and all relevant departments and units of the University responsible for organizing orientation activities came together to discuss implementation plans for achieving this objective. One of the planned outputs of that initiative was the development of a framework, for the inclusion of additional activities geared towards helping students to take charge of their own learning, as well as plans for orientation activities that would be implemented throughout the academic year.

In May 2012, the proposal to revamp the UWI Student Orientation Programme was approved. This Programme is now known as the First Year Experience (FYE).