CPUT’s Co-operative Education Unit is being recognised on a local and international level for its work and research.
Unit partners were commended for their commitment during the third annual Work Integrated Learning Africa Conference held in Durban. Hosted by The Southern African Society for Co-operative Education (SASCE) the conference awarded Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa and construction company Haw & Inglis for their partnerships with CPUT in providing work placements for students.
CPUT staff members also presented various papers at the conference highlighting the work and research they are doing into cooperative education. These ranged from investigating work integrated learning in teacher education to a paper looking at legitimation code theory for the purpose of making a recommendation to teaching pedagogy.
The Unit’s team members travelled to Durban immediately after an overseas trip to Stuttgart, Germany where they took part in the World Association for Cooperative Education’s Third International Research Symposium on Cooperative and Work Integrated Education.
There CPUT Cooperative Education Manager Carver Pop was presented with the Best Refereed Research Paper Award as part of a team of international academics.
Pop, Dr Buratin Khampirat of Suranaree University of Technology in Thailand and Dr Suniti Bandaranaike of James Cook University of Australia’s winning paper was called “Efficacy of Work Integrated Learning: Pre and Post Perception among Co-operative Education Students.”
“Winning this through collaborative means on collaborative projects reinforces the notion of being linked into international best practice. Not only as followers of best practice but as establishers of best practice, internationally.
“CPUT can really feel proud of its accomplishment,” said Pop.
Winning in Germany came a year after winning the paper for best refereed researched paper at the WACE annual conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand when he worked with Khampirat on “Labour Market Needs and Graduate Competence: An Examination of the Gap between Employer Expectations and New Engineering Graduate Performance in Thailand.”
Pop pointed out that work integrated learning was one aspect that sets CPUT apart from research based universities and emphasised the importance of establishing the institution as the university of employer’s choice.
“Work integrated learning is not an event in our curriculum, it is the cornerstone of what we do. It’s the institution’s response to a societal reality. Our reality is high unemployment and low youth skills and work integrated learning actually addresses both of those,” he said.
Written by Theresa Smith
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