There are several ways staff can get involved in helping us to raise money for Red Nose Day this Friday (15 March).

We have a cupcake sweepstake taking place at the Medway building reception from Monday 11 through to Friday 15 March. Pick a cupcake flavour from the poster, pay £2 and you could win £30! The cupcake winner will be announced on Friday at 15,00 at the Medway building reception.

Dress down and wear something red on Friday for a donation of £2.

The Great Kent Red Nose Bake–Off Challenge!  We would like to invite staff to take part in a Bake-Off Challenge on Friday. Bake something sweet (no cheating must be homemade) and drop off to R2-09 before 11.00 on Friday. Professor Nick Grief, Dean for Medway will judge the entries. The winner will be announced at 11.30 in R2-09 where you are welcome to join us for tea and coffee (free of charge) and where you will have an opportunity to purchase cakes (please feel free to donate a cake).

If you would like to enter the bake off could you please email me at MedwayMastersoffice@kent.ac.uk

Hope you to see you on Friday to support this worthy charity

Jodie Innes
Master’s Office & College Support coordinator

The Corporate Events team is looking for volunteers to help during congregations for Medway and Canterbury – can you help?

Medway (Rochester Cathedral):

• Tuesday 9 July (x2 ceremonies), 10:30, 14:30

Canterbury (Canterbury Cathedral):

• Monday 15 July (x2 ceremonies) 14:30, 19:30
• Tuesday 16 July (x3 ceremonies) 10.30, 14.30, 19.30
• Wednesday 17 July (x2 ceremonies) 10.30, 14.30
• Thursday 18 July (x3 ceremonies) 10.30, 14.30, 19.30
• Friday 19 July (x1 ceremony) 10.30

This is a special day for all of our graduating students, and a great opportunity to be involved in a feel-good University event.

We have a variety of roles available for volunteers, so whether you would like to be in the Cathedral for the ceremony, helping the graduands check-in, or managing the guest queue, there is something suitable for everyone.

Things to know:

• Volunteers working two consecutive ceremonies will be provided with lunch or dinner in between their two shifts
• Volunteers can choose any ceremony ‘shifts’ from the above list, and full training will be available for your designated role
• In any role, there will be a member of the Congregations’ team on hand to support you
• Different roles will have different start and finish times due to the requirements of that role for the ceremony
• It’s a wonderful week and is a great opportunity to see any students that you have supported graduate.

If you would like to get involved in July 2019 Congregations, we would be delighted to have you!

To register your interest or to find out more about the roles available, please email congregations@kent.ac.uk with your preferred ceremony/ies or your query.

We hope to hear from you soon.

Congregations
Corporate Events, Development Office

The University was very sorry to hear of the death of disability rights activist Professor Mike Oliver, on 2 March 2019.

Tom Sharp, on behalf of the DHM Steering group, Student Support and Wellbeing, wrote this tribute:

Professor Mike Oliver was a Kent undergraduate and studied for his PhD here, graduating in 1979. Mike then led an MA in Social Work at the University of Kent, and in 1983 wrote ‘Social Work with Disabled People’ in which he framed the Social Model of Disability. The Social Model has been used beyond the field of social work; adopted within Higher Education and across the public sector, as a method by which to challenge and improve public services. Mike modestly admitted the success of the idea went far beyond his original intentions, to become the best practice model for working with disabled people; ‘…the social model was received much more enthusiastically by disabled people because it made an immediate connection to their own experiences’ (Mike Oliver).

Mike’s activism in the 1980s contributed to pressure on the government to pass the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995. Mark Pimm of Birkbeck University comments that ‘Professor Oliver completely changed the way British people view disability, transitioning from disability being something you have because you have the impairment, to something that results from the choices society makes. By making this transition the disability movement was able to secure the resources from government and others that has done so much to improve all of our lives.’

Here at Student Support and Wellbeing, we connected with Mike in 2017 when he agreed to come out of retirement to speak at the University’s inaugural Disability History Month, giving a distinguished visitor lecture. Mike enjoyed coming back to his alma mater and returned again in November 2018, as we had made a film in recognition of his life and work, which is now available on YouTube (below). It has been an absolute pleasure to meet and work with Mike, who was always kind and generous with his time.

Anna Morell of the KCC Physical Disability Forum writes: ‘Mike was an absolute titan in our community. A pioneer, a relentless campaigner, and effectively one of the founding fathers of the Social Model of Disability. Greatly respected for his huge intelligence, his straightforwardness, and for many of us in Kent, his presence, he was a mighty force for change. He was loved, and his absence will be felt so keenly, not just in Kent, but globally’.

Our thoughts and love are with his wife Joy and family at this deeply sad time.

The University of Kent made this film on his life and work.

The T24 Drama Society, run by Kent Union, has been shortlisted for Best Arts Society in the National Societies Awards 2019. As a student society, T24 organises six theatre shows per term, regular drama  workshops and Work In Progress sessions, and a whole host of other socials and events.

The National Societies Awards celebrate the achievements of student societies at different universities and Further Education establishments around the country.

Toby Smith, president of T24 Drama Society and studying for a BA (Hons) in Drama and English Language and Linguistics, said: ‘We’re delighted to be shortlisted. This is down to the hard work and commitment of every single member of the society to create a fun environment whilst creating new and exciting theatre.’

The awards ceremony will be held on 30 April 2019 at the student union of Manchester Metropolitan University. To book, please see the National Societies Awards webpage.

Kent Union’s Islamic Society and Molly Hope, Editor in Chief of InQuire, Kent Union’s on-campus newspaper, have also been shortlisted for awards.

To see the full shortlist, please see the National Societies Awards webpage.

Plans for the first Kent and Medway Medical School (KMMS) are progressing well.

An update by KMMS Dean, Chris Holland, highlights:

• Programme approval – at a joint event on 28 February, both universities gave approval for KMMS to open in September 2020
• GMC accreditation – KMMS has completed stage three of the accreditation process and received very complimentary feedback
• Widening participation – initiatives include developing a comprehensive outreach programme for Years 9-13 students
• Student recruitment – the new KMMS website went live in February and the first KMMS Open Day is planned for 6 April
• Staff recruitment – recruitment is underway for both academic and professional services posts within KMMS
• Academic collaborations – colleagues are invited to share ideas with our KMMS liaison academics.

KMMS, a collaboration between the University of Kent Canterbury Christ Church University, will bring together the existing centres of excellence in health and medically-related education at both universities, with local healthcare organisations, to offer a new model of patient-focused medical education. The medical school will also catalyse exciting new education, research and innovation activities in a transdisciplinary way across other Faculties, Schools and Programmes.

The medical school will offer five-year undergraduate medicine programmes resulting in a joint Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (BMBS) degree, recognised as a Primary Medical Qualification (PMQ) by the General Medical Council (GMC), awarded by both the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University. KMMS teaching and research will happen across both universities’ campuses.

You can read the KMMS update – March 2019 in full. Further updates will follow over the coming months. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more, see the KMMS website.

Celebrate Red Nose Day 2019 on Friday 15 March and raise money for the fantastic charity Comic Relief at the same time. Kent Sport will be putting on a range of fun activities to get involved in throughout the day:

Cycle to Paris – Kent Sport are attempting to cycle the 223 miles from Canterbury to Paris on stationary bikes, and we need your help (it’s a long way). Sign up for a 15-minute time slot, or more, and go as far as you can. Slots available from 07.30 to 16.30. For more information, see the Cycle to Paris Facebook event.

Red Nose Day classes – Join us for some special themed classes including BodyPump, Sleepercise (replacing stretch, tone and relax) and hula-hooping (replacing express spin). For more information see the Red Nose Day classes Facebook event.

Kent Sport will also donate £1 from the sale of each Gold or Silver membership on the day.

Bring your spare change! Donations welcome, all money raised will go to Comic Relief.

Ensuring recruitment is efficient, effective, consistent and transparent is vitally important for us as an organisation and therefore it is key that all staff involved in the process are equipped with the knowledge and skills to actively engage with our processes.

We are pleased to introduce our new online staff training platform on Moodle by launching our recruitment and selection blended learning training programme.

For more information regarding the new Moodle Staff Training platform please visit our blog by clicking here and to find out more about the recruitment and selection training, including how to enrol please visit our webpage by clicking here.

It’s madness and craziness all over again in the biggest franchise of Bollywood with a bunch of crazy characters on a mad adventure and you can see it for FREE!

Total Dhamaal is the third instalment of the Dhamaal film series and sequel to the 2011 film Double Dhamaal.  It follows a group of people that learn about a hidden treasure and then they race to find it and claim it.  But it’s not as easy as it seems. Is there any truth about the hidden booty? After a day full of life changing, near death experiences, will the adventure ever end or another one begin?

Tickets are FREE for this event on Wednesday 20 March at 19.00 and can be booked through the Gulbenkian.

The Learning & Organisational Development team would like to invite you to attend the next Aurora @Kent event supported by the University’s women’s network.

As part of our continued commitment to the Advance HE Aurora Programme, this event is open to all staff; professional services and academic – emphatically not women only. All are welcome!

The event will be on Wednesday 20 March, from 13.00 to 14.30, on our Canterbury Campus, Darwin Lecture Theatre 1.

In this session, Amalia Arvaniti, Professor of linguistics, from the University’s School of European Culture and Languages, department of English Language and Linguistics, will be delivering a talk on ‘Muted Groups and Implicit Bias’.

Professor Arvaniti’s research focuses on the study of speech; among other topics she studies speech variation related to social variables, including gender. For the last 15 years she has been teaching a module on language and gender that, while popular, sometimes receives negative reviews for being too feminist. Over the course of 15 years of teaching and updating this material she has noticed that sexism remains alive and well and especially hard to spot when expressed in subtle yet familiar ways. This prompted her to start a Facebook page as the bland feminist, a title inspired by a typo in a student evaluation, where when she has time she posts news items and commentary on sexism.

In the Aurora event, she will talk about the ways in which language can encode and reinforce sexist attitudes (whether overt or implicit) and how such usage can lead to silencing women and minorities. She has no panacea to offer but will discuss some strategies to counter these effects.

Booking is not required for this event.