One of the ways the faculty is supporting its students is through investing and prioritising peer- led initiatives such as the Edu- Community Group, where 3 rd and 4 th year students peer-train 1 st and 2 nd year students. The faculty will also be looking to reintroduce their successful excursion programme that is geared for 1 st year students to meaningfully integrate them into the faculty, and introduce a level of support that is approachable for them. She concluded: “I believe education is where we lay the foundations of justice and care for others in society. We are moving into a fast- changing world, and education is where we set the foundation for young people to develop. If we get that wrong, we doom millions of young people to a hopeless life.”
had the orientation programmes we do now, we would have been given supplementary support, none of which were there 30 odd years ago.” She obtained her BA in Education following her studies at both the Rand College of Education, and UNISA respectively. Petersen works tirelessly to ensure that first-generation students are supported academically, and that the teaching profession is producing top talent for the sector, and for society at large. She smilingly points out that: There has been a shift in the way in which teaching is perceived as a career path. I believe more people are seeing education as a viable, exciting, and honourable career path. We’re hoping at one point, we get to a place where it’s harder to become a teacher than it is becoming a doctor or a lawyer.
helps her motivate young people to change their lives. “I’m not ashamed of it - I was a first-generation university student, I had no idea what was going to be expected of me, and back then the institution still had pervasive racism,” she explained. She added that “I couldn’t afford the books, I didn’t have the resources and I had these lecturers who couldn’t care less about a black child’s experience. I found that the institutions in those days weren’t really geared towards first- generation black students.” But she is also quick to admit that she may have been a little lazy too. “I came into it with an orientation that it would be easy because high school wasn’t bad for me, and I thought varsity wouldn’t be too bad either. Yet also, I didn’t know where to ask for help.“I didn’t fail badly – but I think if the university
Students and Faculty staff members
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