What is advocacy and what do METKA’s advocacy people even do?
Advocacy tends to be pretty invisible if you don’t need it yourself. But behind the scenes, METKA’s advocacy team is dealing with student contacts AKA cases throughout the year. The handling of cases is based on trust and therefore it is not possible to communicate them externally.
What we can reveal, however, is that during the last year we dealt with an even number of 100 cases. So far this year, we have dealt with 35 cases. These are contacts with METKA by individual students or sometimes entire groups. We deal with cases according to the students’ wishes. Sometimes it is enough to give tips and direct the student to the right person, sometimes we deal with the contact e.g. with the teacher of the course, while the student remains anonymous. Often, cases are resolved to the satisfaction of all parties, but sometimes there’s not much that can be done, if no instructions are neglected but it’s rather a teacher’s pedagogical solution that does not suit everyone, as every people learn in a different way.
In addition to cases, we do a lot of invisible work in the form of influencing in working groups, monitoring student policy and working with student representatives. METKA is involved in many internal groups within Metropolia, but also in regional or national groups to make the student voice heard. The advocacy team also meets regularly with head of schools, campus coordinators and the Director of Lifelong Learning. These meetings are used to discuss current issues and to highlight challenges that METKA has become aware of.
The advocacy team has also been kept busy by elections, most recently the municipal and county elections. Although elections are said to be the best time for people, we are quite happy that there will be no elections in Finland next year.
From time to time we also write opinions and statements. These are usually related to planned changes to laws, regulations or rules. For example, METKA has written an opinion on a law draft that suggested increasing the maximum fee per study credit for open universities of applied sciences from EUR 15 to EUR 45.
Ultimately, the purpose of advocacy is to improve the lives of students and make the advocacy redundant.
Is there anything else you would like to ask about the role of advocacy? Or are you wondering about something that has come up in your studies and you’re not quite sure how to proceed? Send us a message at low-threshold to advocacy@metkaweb.fi. And even if you don’t want your case to go any further, we’d love to hear about your experiences. We can use this information to support our own advocacy work!
This post is also available in Suomi.