ON CAMPUS
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refugee experience, either themselves or through their family or
other volunteering roles. They receive extensive training from us
and the Department of Education. STARTTS (the NSW Service for
the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors)
has been involved in the training as well.
The volunteer students then go out to the schools for
about 10 weeks. One of our university students mentors two
school students from years 9 to 11 or 12. We were advised that a
one-to-two mentoring relationship would perhaps be a little bit
less daunting than a one-to-one. The first three weeks are building
rapport, finding out what the needs of the mentees are; there’s a lot
of listening on the part of the mentor.
The middle section of the program is about finding out
information, explaining how to gain knowledge about pathways.
We encourage the mentees to do the work themselves, so the
mentors are not tutoring, they’re not offering academic advise,
but they’re pointing the way towards certain websites and they’re
talking about experiences where people might get information
themselves to make their own decisions. That’s important.
The final few weeks of the program include a campus visit. The
students from all of the schools who have taken part come onto
campus for a day. Our mentors host them and it’s a fun day. We
have some motivational speeches, they get a tour of campus, they
have a nice lunch, and get some hands-on interactive science
workshops, etc. They get to speak in a lecture theatre if they’d like
to do so. Those last few weeks are about drawing up a concrete
program for each of the mentees as to how they’re going to move
forward, so they might be a bit more [certain] about their pathways
to education. They might decide they’re going to go to TAFE before
they come to university, but they know where they need to look
and what they need to do.
Is it more or less life coaching, rather than academic assistance?
It is. There is a component that is study skills – for example, time
management. In some cases, we might run a group session if we
see that everybody in a group has issues about how they can find
time to study, because we know that many students from refugee
backgrounds also maybe have to act as interpreters for their whole
family. They’re having to work to support their families, they don’t have
space where they can study, so study ski