Good morning students, my name is Anita Jonker.
Goeie môre studente, my naam is Anita Jonker.
Molweni bafundi, Anita Jonker igama lam.
I am going to tell you about the extended degree
program and the academic support that we provide in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
So here you see a beautiful picture of students graduating and you will notice that
not one of them is wearing a mask and this is what I hope for you in four years’ time
that you have this privilege to graduate without masks.
So what I want to share with you today is preparing for your first year in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
and that means what you can do in your matric year to prepare, academic support
that is available in our faculty and then also academic and other support available on campus.
So how do you prepare for your first year in our faculty?
You must remember that there is a very big gap between school and university.
And I am going to refer to four major differences and the first one refers to learning attitudes.
So at school you were awarded for rote learning and giving back what the teachers told you.
Whereas at university we require deep learning
and that means you are going to have to develop a mindset of learning for deep learning.
With regards to reading literacy there is a huge difference between the reading load at school
and the reading load at university. There are courses at the university that you can take to
improve your reading, speed and comprehension, and I would really recommend that you do that, and of
course read as much as possible to develop your vocabulary as well.
Then the other thing refers to self-discipline.
You must remember to develop a self-driven, independent work ethic.
At the school your teachers and your parents often put a lot of pressure on you to perform.
You need intrinsic motivation to study.
You must be able to work on your own and to do your own time planning and to develop your own study methods.
Then a very important thing for university teaching is independent thinking.
You must develop a critical mindset.
You cannot accept what you read and what you see at face value and you will do that by listening to what your lectures
are saying in the classroom, listening to your peers and reading and reading authoritative newspapers.
Here is the Afrikaans version of what I have just said.
And then what academic support is available in our faculty? So I am going to refer to three things.
Language support, the Weekly Compulsory Tutorials and then the Early Assessment.
And then we got trilingual subject glossaries for most of your first year subjects.
So if you enrol for a subject next year, make sure that you know exactly where to get the trilingual subject glossary.
Try and get a printout, take it along to the classroom,
but we will also have all our terminology on a cell phone app next year called Mobilex.
So just remember to download that Mobilex app before you arrive at university.
Then most of our lectures are presented in bilingual mode, which will also help Afrikaans students
to understand English slides and then we have instituted interpreting in isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English.
You can request for an isiXhosa interpreter or an Afrikaans interpreter
if you struggle with the academic English in your classroom.
Then you also have access to free online dictionaries on the library website
and in all the HUMARGA computer rooms you will be able to access these dictionaries.
Of course when it is online learning and you must learn at home, it will benefit you to have a dictionary,
but otherwise you will be fine with the online dictionary at university.
We don’t recommend that you spend a lot of time
buying a dictionary before you come to university, especially if you have financial difficulties.
So secondly we have weekly compulsory tutorials for all our first year students and you must
make sure that you know the date and the weekly time slots when these tutorials are presented.
In every subject those tutorials are compulsory and you do assessments there that count for marks.
Then lastly we have early assessments during the first six weeks of term.
That is basically a wakeup call for you to see how you have progressed in your academics. Hier
kan julle net die vertaling in Afrikaans ook sien.
And then what academic support is available in our faculty in terms of the extended degree programme?
So the extended degree programme we established as part of the transformation of higher education
to address past inequalities and systemic obstacles to equity and student success.
But we also admit students who do not deal well with working under stress. So we have a very
sophisticated selection procedure for this programme. The admission requirements:
you must have an NSC of between 60 and 62%, 62.9% actually. We look at your socio-economic status,
which is determined by historical disadvantage, your guardians’ or parents’
income, and the quality of schooling. And then EDP students do their first year over two years
and receive extensive academic support including a mentor program where senior EDP students mentor
first years. We have an Introduction to the Humanities programme that gives you
introduction to the core concepts of the main subjects and then we also have a subject called,
Text in the Humanities that focuses on the different writing requirements for the
different subjects, plagiarism and the different genres that are used in the different subjects.
Here you can see three of our EDP students who graduated successfully in 2019
when we were still allowed to have real graduations.
Okay, and then what other academic support is available on campus? So there is the language
centre with the link there which offers language courses. You can make appointments with writing
consultants and then they also have a variety of trilingual terminology booklets that are available
online as well. And then we have the Centre for Student Counselling and Development –
I have the link that you can see there – and they offer free workshops on study methods, time and stress
management, and they also provide professional therapy should you need that at any time and
all those services are free, which is amazing. Hier kan julle die Afrikaanse opsomming ook lees.
And then I want to recommend that you visit our first-year and EDP website,
which has been just developed and updated, where you will find all
the necessary information that you need to prepare you for your
first year university. I am looking forward to meeting you.