Students bring learning to the community

By Jennifer Myers
Photography by Ewan Nicholson

EVERY SEMESTER, hundreds of U of C students are using what they learn not just to help themselves earn degrees, but to make a difference in the lives of Calgarians as well.

Nursing students, for example, are helping seniors plan for their future medical care. Communication students are supporting women who are recovering from domestic abuse and addictions. Engineering students are designing tools to make daily living more manageable.

“This is different from traditional volunteering because the students’ community experiences also enrich their classroom learning,” says Ann Tierney, vice-provost (students). “Students are provided wonderful exposure to the best and brightest scholars, the latest innovations in business, science, technology and social thought. As a university, we owe it to the local community to bring them what we’ve learned here in ways that can help with the issues and problems they are facing,”

A team of eight nursing students spent a good part of the fall semester in the McKenzie Towne Assisted Care Centre, implementing a new way to build awareness among seniors about advance medical care planning. Their work, part of a community practicum, will help care facilities prepare for a new Calgary Health Region policy on advance care planning.

An advance care plan tells medical professionals how to treat someone based on their values and beliefs in instances where illness makes them unable to speak for themselves.

“For example, some people may not believe in taking blood products through transfusions or others may want medical professionals to prolong their lives as much as possible no matter what state they’re in,” says Janet Arnold, education specialist for the Advance Care Planning Initiative at the Calgary Health Region.

According to the health region, a very low percentage of retirement home residents in Calgary have an advance care plan in place. To change this, the McKenzie Towne Centre approached the Faculty of Nursing to bring students in and help identify some first steps.

The students learned that just 10 percent of residents had advance care plans and 60 percent had code levels (indicating do-not-resuscitate orders). They responded by producing a 30-minute presentation to introduce the concept of advance care planning to residents and their families.

“The biggest difficulty is this is not an easy topic to address in a retirement facility,” says Lindsay Tisdale, a third-year nursing student. “We needed to explain that an advance care plan is not just for them, it is a way to communicate their wishes and values to their loved ones and health-care providers.”

Several residents completed plans as a result of the students’ work and the presentation is now a model for other retirement residences. The team of students was honoured in February with the Greensleeve Award from the Calgary Health Region for their contribution to the community.

Tisdale says she and her classmates take satisfaction in knowing that the needs and wishes of those residents will be met, that their families are empowered to make informed decisions and in having played a role in addressing a real need in our health-care system.

“The course opened my eyes to how important the community is,” says Tisdale. “Too often we can get caught up in our individual lives and not recognize we have a community with some weaknesses, needs and gaps that need to be addressed. If we can do so, we can make the community stronger.”

Each year in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, close to 200 students research, develop recommendations for and implement communication plans, volunteer recruitment strategies, fundraising events and community partnerships for local and international non-profit organizations.

Fourth-year student Anushka Nagji and her team spent 15 to 20 hours each week with the Youville Women’s Residence to produce the organization’s first annual report.

“It’s not until you get out in the community and work with organizations that you realize there is a whole lot more to your degree than just theory and books,” says Nagji, who is enrolled in communities, culture and communication, the faculty’s flagship community service learning course. “After this class, I can imagine using my university knowledge and finding places where I can apply the concepts and understanding I’ve gained.”

Youville is a residence offering programming and counselling to women and their children who have left circumstances of domestic violence or who are recovering from substance abuse. The organization needed a communication tool to assist in fundraising and to increase awareness about its work. Before Nagji and her classmates came along, Youville did not have the resources to produce an annual report.

“The students are so committed and this experience gives them a good idea of what non-profits deal with,” says Cheryll Nandee, executive director of Youville. “We’ve had several students continue volunteering with us. It is a great way to engage young people for future volunteerism.”

Community work at the U of C is grounded in an academic foundation where students look for connections between research and community organizations.

“In the classroom they learn about cultural and social issues, to identify and research a problem and to hone their critical thinking ability,” says Kathleen Scherf, dean of the Faculty of Communication and Culture. “This gives them the skill to see a problem or issue in more than one way. The advantage is that it gives them an outsider’s point of view—the ability to see problems differently from those within an organization.”

Youville’s annual report is now a yearly sustainable project used for fundraising. It will help the organization increase the number of beds available and refine its programs.

“I learned that we really do need to make efforts for fundraising and volunteering,” says Nagji. “Money is so important in the lives of women in need. They are aching for a place to go and there is a dire need for more organizations like Youville.”

Students in the Schulich School of Engineering are learning about design and communications while creating better circumstances for people with limited dexterity.

Everyone fumbles with their keys at one time or another, but imagine how difficult it is to get that key in the keyhole with limited use of your hands and fingers? This is just the kind of challenge Barry Lindemann, BComm’97, faces on a daily basis. An injury from a diving accident 13 years ago left him quadriplegic and in a wheelchair.

“I had to become an engineer because of my disability,” says Lindemann, who is now the manager of community affairs for the Canadian Paraplegic Association. “Getting an apple from the bottom of the crisper or an item off the top shelf of the cupboard is difficult from a wheelchair.”

Daryl Caswell and his first-year engineering students invited Lindemann to speak to them about the challenges he experiences in daily life. The result was 180 one-of-a-kind inclusive solutions to make daily living more easily manageable.

Students work from the concept of “universal inclusive design” which Caswell explains is designing something to meet the needs of the broadest spectrum of people possible.

“Every disabled person has unique needs that are rarely met. And we don’t want to design something that makes them appear even more disabled,” says Caswell. “Our students put a magnifying glass on a design that most of us accept, but disabled people can’t. Then they come up with a better way to design that item so it is more useful for a greater number of people.”

Among the students’ inventions is the Home Proximity Key, where a key becomes a chip on a card, in a watch or in a cellphone which is swiped over a magnetic box to unlock a door. The V-Shirt is a shirt with Velcro in place of buttons, magnetic cuff links and thumb loops that help the wearer pull the sleeves on and off. The multi-purpose cup is an all-in-one drinking cup that transforms so it can be grasped by a narrow stem (like a wine glass), or handle (like a mug).

“We didn’t realize simple tasks could be so challenging for some people,” says Jamin Laplante, a first-year engineering student and one of the inventors of the multi-purpose cup. “The cup incorporates the advantages of a wine glass, a mug and a drinking glass to fit all types of dexterity situations. We may not change the world in conventional terms, but if we change the world for even one person—that is what engineering is about.”