Students compelled to volunteer

Jen Purcell. Pic by: Ray Strange

All students at a leading university will have to undertake volunteer work and study subjects from the arts and sciences under an overhaul of its curriculum designed to provide a broader education and more socially aware graduates.

In a first for an Australian university, Macquarie University vice-chancellor Steven Schwartz today will announce a partnership with Australia Volunteers International that will create a mini peace corps, giving undergraduate students the opportunity to do volunteer work overseas.

Called the Global Futures Program, it will develop programs with local communities throughout Australia, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Some form of community work will be compulsory for all undergraduate students at Macquarie under the new curriculum, to start in 2010.

In addition, the university will require all undergraduate students to study subjects from the humanities, social sciences and sciences so that arts students must take science subjects and science students must take arts subjects.

The university, in northern Sydney, had also considered making the learning of a foreign language compulsory but it was not feasible at this stage.

Professor Schwartz told The Australian that the new curriculum was based on three themes of place, planet and participation, and was designed to provide students with a broader education than one geared solely to a vocation and getting a job.

"Universities are more than just narrow vocational schools; they have the opportunity to change the world, to shape society and shape democracy," he said. "It's about education for life, not just for a job.

"We're trying to infuse the institution with more than just a utilitarian vocational mission as one that also makes difference to a more democratic and inclusive society."

Professor Schwartz said the new curriculum developed the university's commitment to social inclusion and equity, and fitted in with programs already in place at the university, such as MULTILIT, a remedial literacy program being used in Queensland's Cape York, and the Teach for Australia scheme. Macquarie University, in partnership with Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute, is developing the Teach for Australia program.

It is based on similar schemes in the US and Britain to recruit the brightest graduates to teach for a short time in disadvantaged schools before they start their professional careers.

Macquarie's focus on a broader education follows the restructure at Melbourne University, called the Melbourne Model and based on US college degrees, which offers six broad undergraduate degrees followed by a graduate professional degree in specialist areas such as law or medicine.

Macquarie University arts student Jen Purcell, 22, has travelled to India twice as a volunteer to teach in schools in Rajasthan, the first time while still at high school, with World Vision.

In 2006, Ms Purcell returned to India of her own volition and lived in the slums alongside the children she taught.

"I cried for the first week. Every day I had to go back to a house with no electricity and limited water," she said.

"It was just so awful. To have to stay for another six or seven weeks, I thought I can't do it because it's nothing that I'm used to. But it was the best time of my life, even the bad bits."

Ms Purcell said the experience had changed the course of her life and she had returned to change her major from ancient history and was now looking to work in international aid and education.

But even for students who would continue with their original choice of profession, Ms Purcell thought all students would benefit from such an experience.

"In the increasingly globalised world that we live in, that ability to understand other cultures is a huge advantage for graduates."


The Australian, May 6, 2008