PETL Community Outreach Project

Under the PETL Access and Success program, we intend to make university education more accessible to under-represented groups.

By exposing students and the general public to the teaching and research that takes place on campus, we intend to 'demystify' what we do in the so-called "ivory tower" and thereby show that a university education is not as daunting as one might believe. We will complete this project in three ways:

1. Profs2Classes - Partnering with Anglophone School District South, we will facilitate getting professors and instructors to middle and high school classrooms at the request of classroom teachers. Professors and instructors will speak to their research/teaching specialties as subject matter experts.

2. Open University - This will be a series of daytime general audience talks designed to throw open the doors of the campus and encourage everyone to see the university as part of the community rather than as 'in addition' to the community. We will run a series of drop-in sessions - classes, lectures, and workshops - with university faculty, staff, and graduate students.

3. Researching Accessibility - We seek to understand the accessibility issues to post-secondary education (both university and college) in the province of New Brunswick. In the first instance, we seek to identify non-tuition barriers to post-secondary education. If university/college was free, what challenges still exist to attending? We'll use focus groups to talk to university/college student services, to educators in both the formal and supplemental high school settings, and to students from high schools, college, and university settings. With partnerships formed and issues identified, subsequent research will seek to explore policy changes and strategies to mitigate the barriers identified