WAVE is a development centre for neurodivergent talent, where pupils, students, lecturers, study and career advisors and professionals from the work field work, learn and create together. The goal is to find a suitable learning environment or workplace for young people with, for example, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, giftedness or hypersensitivity.
Lost talent
Finding a suitable environment is often unsuccessful, causing neurodivergent young people to develop low self-esteem. As a result, much talent is lost. And that is exactly where the problem lies. ‘While the Brainport region is crying out for new talent, too many graduates cannot find work that does justice to their study programmes,’ say Manon Krabbenborg and Marlou Heskes.
The two programme leaders started the project together based on an idea they developed at Fontys Career Jumpstart. ‘Career Jumpstart is a career centre for young people with support needs. For example, we help them apply for jobs and guide them in the initial period of their career after obtaining their diploma,’ says Krabbenborg. ‘During that process, we often see that neurodivergent students have low self-esteem and little self-knowledge, which makes the transition to the labour market very complicated. WAVE should help with that.’
Need for funding
At Fontys, about 30 percent of all students are neurodivergent. So the target group is quite large, but still too little is being done with it. ‘That's because it's a complex problem. If it had all been easy, an initiative like WAVE would have been set up long ago.’ Of course, money was also needed.
‘And we now have it in the form of two different grants and subsidies; one from ASML and one from the Comenius programme. ASML was extremely enthusiastic about our idea because one of their spearheads is to do something with neurodivergence. They have been working with neurodivergent colleagues for some time now on ways to allow their talents to come into their own more fully. These colleagues are also contributing ideas to WAVE.’
The WAVE kick-off took place on Wednesday, and now the project can officially get started. Not only students and lecturers from Fontys will be involved, but also pupils, students and lecturers from other schools, plus people from the work field. The focus will initially be mainly on the Brainport region, but the aim is to eventually involve the rest of the Netherlands as well.
Creating awareness
‘We want to develop learning activities that ensure more self-competence and career development in pupils and students, so they can make a better step into the labour market. But that also means we have to create more awareness among lecturers and the work field by teaching them about neurodivergence. Many employers still have cold feet when it comes to someone who is ‘different’. A large proportion of all employers say they do not want to hire someone with a psychological vulnerability because they are not prepared for it.
In other words, they know too little about it. That is what WAVE is for; we want to help those employers to better understand that different type of brain, but also to allay the fears of lecturers. And we are going to do that with the help of experience expertise, among other things. A team of design thinkers will get to work developing learning activities once every two weeks. A group of fresh thinkers will meet four times a year to provide critical input and feedback to the design thinkers.
This will ultimately result in various learning activities, the nature of which is not yet known. For example, one could think of a festival, training or maybe even a podcast. ‘But we have yet to see,’ said the project leaders. ‘In any case, the goal is to bring the beautiful and unique brains of neurodivergent young people to fruition.’
Source: bron.fontys.nl