Promoting diversity in a community engagement module for undergraduate engineering students

Abstract

The Community-based Project module is a compulsory undergraduate module of the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. It is an eight-credit (80-hour) module and entails students working at least 40 hours in the community, and then reflecting on their experiences. Since 2005, about 20 000 students have worked with an average of 350 campus-community partners on more than 5 800 different projects each year. These projects were completed in eight different countries and involved various sectors of the community.Students work in groups, which include students studying for different degrees, as well as students from different cultures, religions and gender. The module coordinator and students engage with diverse campus-community partners. Subsequently, the aim is to increase students’ awareness of their responsibility towards the community, for the students to develop cognisance of their citizenship and for them to learn to utilise their acquired skills in a specific society. The module integrates both service and learning objectives to enable the students to apply their newly acquired knowledge to the betterment of the communities they serve. This paper describes how diversity is embedded in the module through its activities, impact and social engineering to enhance peace engineering on the African continent.