Megan Alexander, Andre Cornelius and Robert Schultz, ECP lecturers in the PAG Foundation, took their curriculum development work to HELTASA this year. Below they share their experiences of this significant annual gathering of higher education scholars, researchers, academics and practitioners.

Heltasa 2018 afforded us the opportunities to engage in practice-sharing, networking and collegiality. Best practice, complexities and challenges in HE were brought to the fore through presentations, interactive posters, discussion sessions, table discussions, workshops and networking events. The ECP Special Interest Group (SIG) sessions were particularly interesting and helpful in that ECP databases would be formed or managed better. This would serve as a tool or vehicle for ECP academics to remain in touch, to share information or practices and to rally support for issues around concerns like policy change. Our presentation on Navigating Curriculum Implementation: the experiences of ECP lecturers in the Public Administration and Governance Department was well attended with visitors from a range of universities as well as CPUT colleagues. Questions and comments posed will allow us to further interrogate and respond to our curriculum and continually debate its relevance and purpose.

Energy access
Energy affordability
Mini-grids, nano-grids and smart grids
E-mobility
Smart metering and AMI
Energy efficiency, air conditioning and heat pumps
Renewable energy and power electronics
Appliances and smart appliances
Low voltage DC and DC Home standards
Energy Management, Ambient Intelligence
IoT in Energy
Green Energy
Energy Modelling

In line with World Bank initiative for universal access to energy and sustainable energy for all, various solutions are being implemented and monitored for their efficiency. Among the solutions for increasing universal access to electricity are off grid electrification such as solar, diesel and hybrid systems.The humble home, from Cape to Cairo, from Beijing to Fez or London to Calcutta, remain the focus of energy use that is critical to most people. This home is now almost universally tied into not only an energy use nexus, but also a transportation and communication one.In the fourth revolution new energy technologies will feature. The efficiency and flexibility of energy use will improve with intelligent monitoring and connectivity of devices.  Low-cost renewable energy, and perhaps bio-energy through genetic modification, 3D-printed nuclear reactors, fusion power and carbon capture, offer cheaper, cleaner energy. How will these technologies influence and impact
on the Domestic Use of Energy? These are questions we can explore at the 2019 DUE Conference. Increasingly new and novel energy demands will also appear – household robot servants, human exoskeletons, hyperloops, long-distance commuting in autonomous vehicles, hypersonic plane travel, and space holidays. Solar roofs, batteries and electric vehicles will increasingly offer a new way for individuals to create and sell energy services, even if end uses do not change much.The conference will host a FULL DAY Workshop on Microgrids which will also award CPD points for attendance.Come to the African and International DUE 2019!
The conference is a celebration of the convenience of electricity and investigates new ways to “do more with the energy you use” – productive use of a strategic resource by an ever expanding base of consumers in both the residential and business sector means that South Africa can grow its economy thanks to a reliable electricity supply.Enjoy Wellington, an idyllic town 40 minutes from Cape Town, at the finest time of the year! At the same time, please join the local drive to conserve water – our other most precious resource.

25-27 March 2019
We invite you to attend and contribute to the Conference, The conference is a celebration of the convenience of electricity and investigates new ways to “do more with the energy you use” – productive use of a strategic resource by an ever expanding base of consumers in both the residential and business sector means that South Africa can grow its economy thanks to a reliable electricity supply. Enjoy Wellington, and idyllic town 40 minutes from, Cape Town at the finest time of the year! At the same time, please join the local drive to conserve water – our other most precious resource.
Full day workshop on Microgrids / Eskom
Conference fee including workshop R3500. 10% discount for early bird registration
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Important dates
1 December 2018 Submission of abstracts (200 – 220 words).
14 December 2018 Notification of Abstract acceptance.
14 January 2018 Full paper Submission of papers in accordance with DUE guidelines. Submission of full manuscript prepared in accordance with guidelines. Submission before the deadline will allow for papers to be corrected in accordance with recommendations by referees rather than non-acceptance. (For guidelines go to http://www.energyuse.org.za/due/)

14 February 2019 Notification of paper acceptance
28 February 2019 Final version of paper submission
Conference abstracts should be submitted online using the template on the conference webpage www.energyuse.org.za/due/ To register, please complete the registration form under “Registration” on the conference webpage and submit it to due@cput.ac.za
We look forward to welcoming you – and as many of your colleagues as you can bring with you!

Written by Bradley Knight

MA Clinical Psychology and Community Counselling (Stell.)

Often people ‘regulate’ their feelings by pushing it away or running from it, only to have that unpleasant feeling (sadness, anger, hurt) follow them and overwhelm them at the worst of times. A wise person once said, ‘Feelings just want to be felt…then they leave”. So how do YOU do feelings? Do you avoid them? Shut them out? Fight them off? How about trying it differently from now on? Interested? Then keep on reading.

A couple of things before we get going; feelings are neither good nor bad. Depending on how you respond to them or interpret them, they may be experienced as negative or positive, but in essence, there is no such thing as a good feeling or bad feeling. They’re just feelings. And they are transient. They are visitors. They are messengers, motivating you to action.

With that in mind, the first thing you want to do is identify the feeling you are sitting with. For the purpose of this exercise, we will focus on the ‘not-so-nice’ feelings. What feeling is visiting you? Is it frustration? Annoyance? Disappointment? Fear? Sadness? Very often, the feeling on the surface is like the tip of an iceberg, meaning that there are more feelings underlying the ‘visible’ feeling. We can have feelings about feelings; e.g. feeling angry about being sad. The most important task here is to identify and describe what you are feeling in this moment.

Once you have identified the feeling, the next step is to acknowledge the feeling. Don’t get entangled with it. Don’t fight it off or run from it. Just notice it and recognize its presence. Allow yourself to be conscious of the feeling that is visiting and rather than say “I am sad”, try something like “I’m noticing that I’m having a feeling of sadness” – that puts some healthy distance between you and the unpleasant feeling, rather than identifying yourself with it. In other words, learn to become a detached observer of your own feeling state. Don’t judge it. Just notice it without engaging it, in the same way you would notice a fellow passenger on a bus or someone in the que in front of you.

Next, you want to validate the presence of that feeling. In other words, you accept that the feeling is there for a valid reason. Even when you can’t identify what triggered the feeling, validating your own emotional state is a powerful step. You are telling yourself that you are feeling this way for good reason – you are not being ‘silly’ or ‘weak’. Very often this practice of just being able to acknowledge and validate your own emotional state results in the intensity of the feeling subsiding.

But what if it doesn’t subside? Then the next step is to self-soothe until it does. Find a soothing activity that is associated with each of your five senses. What would soothe you by just looking at it? A picture of a love one? What is it about smell that is soothing for you? Touch? Taste? Hearing your favourite song? I’ve got news for you; your brain has been hard-wired to self-soothe ever since you were a baby. When you cried, your emotional state was (hopefully regularly) acknowledged (caregiver responds to the cries for attention); then validated (caregiver thinks to themselves ‘there’s must be good reason why baby is crying’ – hungry? unwell? needs a nappy change) and then if necessary soothed you through your five senses – you seeing your caregiver, smelling their scent, tasting the milk, hearing their voice, feeling their embrace. Do you see how you were hard-wired for soothing using your senses? Now that you are older, the good news is you can learn to self-soothe using your five senses when the intensity of the emotion remains high – even if you didn’t have ideal experiences with your caregiver.

Well-meaning people may tell you to just ‘snap out of it’, but we all know that it doesn’t work that way in reality. You cannot ‘snap out’ of feelings, just like you cannot ‘snap out’ of a cold or flu. It requires learning to acknowledge and self-validate your own emotional states and if necessary, self soothe using your five senses as a way to help you tolerate the distress until it passes. Ultimately the goal is Emotion Regulation –where you manage your feeling states in a way that keeps you in control. For more help with this process and learning more about Mindfulness, Emotion Regulation and Distress Tolerance Techniques, feel free to make an appointment at Student Counselling.

2018 marked the first year that the newly consolidated Design Foundation was implemented at CPUT. The academics and staff teaching on this programme decided to step back and attempt to critically reflect on the implementation experiences for the year. This review process was structured around three particular elements of their curriculum and teaching experiences namely; 1) individual subjects, 2) the overarching curriculum and finally, 3) the organisational structures that supported the functioning of the programme in all its elements.

In a workshop session on 13 November the staff teaching on the Design Foundation, worked alongside Lynn Coleman from the ECP Unit to explore and workshop the overarching curriculum aims for the Design Foundation year. This was part of Stage Two of the three-part curriculum review process. We were joined for some of this discussions by the HoD of Design, Monica di Ruvo.

The main aim of the session was to start a conversation about developing a curriculum aim statement for the programme and then look at how such an aim statement might inform the development of supporting learning outcomes. Staff were also introduced to Bloom’s Domains of Learning as particular curriculum analysis tool that could be used to develop and design both a curriculum aim statement and learning outcomes. This tool was enlisted to help account for and then represent how the aim statement attended to the cognitive (or knowing), values (or self and being) and psychomotor ( or skills and doing) domains of learning.

Some of the most generative aspects of the session were lecturers attempts to use different metaphors to capture the role and function of the curriculum. Lecturers put forward a number of metaphors like boat, anchor, umbrella, bowl, wheel and compass and offered motivations for why a particular metaphor was useful. Lecturers also crafted some interesting illustrations to express their views of the curriculum schema for the Design Foundation incorporating the three domains of learning. The activities and outcomes of the day are a necessary first steps as staff will need to work to refine and then formalise their curriculum aim statement and its supporting specific learning outcomes.

Staff will continue their general review process on 4 December, when they review and reflect on Stage Three – the organisational structures supporting the programme.

This is advance notice for a call that will open at the end of 2018/early 2019.  The conceptualisation of projects and the identification of African & European partners needs to be in place well before applying.

The Intra-Africa Academic Mobility Scheme provides financial support to partnerships of African Higher Education Institutions for the organisation and the implementation of student and staff mobility in high quality master and doctoral programmes within African countries.

Applications by Higher Education Institutions from Africa:

African Higher Education Institutions can apply for an Intra-Africa Academic Mobility Scheme grant in reply to a call for proposals published on the Agency’s website. Applications must be submitted to the Agency in accordance with the conditions and timetable defined in the call for proposals. The applicant institution submits the application on behalf of the partnership, which  must be composed of minimum 4 and maximum 6 African Higher Education Institutions (including the applicant). In addition, a Higher Education Institution from the EU, holding an Erasmus Charter for Higher Education, must be included in the partnership as technical partner.

The selected projects will receive a grant to organise calls for grantees and cover the mobility costs and the scholarships to be awarded to the selected students and staff.

To view previously selected project proposals and the application criteria, please check the programme’s website: https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/intra-africa_en

Please note that only Higher Education Institutions can apply for an Intra-Africa grant and only in reply for call for proposals.

Associate partners (e.g. Associations, NGOs, enterprises, etc.) can also take part. However, given their role in the project, these organisations are not considered as beneficiaries and cannot receive funding from the grant.

At the moment there are no call for proposals open for the programme. The next call is expected to be published by the end of 2018/beginning of 2019. If interested, please check the website regularly where all information will be published in due time:  : https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/intra-africa_en

 Scholarship opportunities for students and academic/administrative staff:

Master students, doctoral candidates, administrative and academic staff from African countries are eligible to receive scholarships. They should address their applications directly to the selected Intra-Africa partnerships in response to calls for applicants that the selected partnerships publish on their projects’ websites.  The scholarship amounts vary according to the type of mobility and the duration – from a minimum duration of 1 month (for staff) to a maximum duration of 4 years (for doctoral candidates).