Abstract
This chapter advocates transformative teaching in later stages of sub-Saharan Africa’s engineering students’ study periods. The teaching is meant to help them discover their potential in direct solution of the region’s engineering problems. Student attention can be drawn to many of these problems through transformative teaching. Two illustrative case studies are presented. They demonstrate how students at one South African University of Technology were enabled to address common, authentic and ‘real world’ problems in the course of their learning. A review of theory of teaching modes is given first, with more focus on transformative teaching. The cases follow. The first case seeds a maintenance and continuous improvement culture among successive student cohorts, eventually producing an evolved new product ready for the market in a period of about 5 years. The second case uses multi-level, multi-national students, deploying multi-sourced funds and working at multi-premises in difficult campus study circumstances, to develop completely new products that are field-tested at two sites about 6000 km apart. Benefits, limitations and challenges of the teaching and how to navigate the latter, are given. Following its substantial benefits and the ways to overcome its challenges, transformative teaching is recommended to all engineering academics in the region.
Highlights
Let us leave the rural areas—from where many urban people, including this author, originate, and still have relatives and homes. Is it nature-ordained that people can live in filthy, crowded and ‘man-made’ disease prone areas [4–6] without any local educated person doing something about it—either out of philanthropy or out of pure business sense? We go on: Why should a country of 40 million people claim to find substantial crude oil or other mineral deposits, and yet, take a generation or two [7] to get the first extract from underground? Let us come to engineering faculties: Figure 1 shows part of a 2-year-old engineering faculty building at one of the region’s leading universities
This chapter on transformative teaching is about practice change in sub-Saharan Africa’s engineering schools and faculties. It draws on a literature survey and experiential work in 4 universities in Eastern, Western and Southern African countries to show that the current dominant mode of teaching in the region’s engineering faculties and colleges is not transformative
Transformative teaching, as described in this chapter’s case studies, is intended to demonstrate this nurturing and its potential effects on the wider society outside the universities. It requires that the students have matured a bit in their engineering thought and practices so that they can have something to reflect on and challenge. This necessitates a transition through transactional teaching, which we briefly describe
Summary
As an adult transformative learner and educator, I will introduce this chapter through some questioning. This chapter on transformative teaching is about practice change in sub-Saharan Africa’s engineering schools and faculties. It draws on a literature survey and experiential work in 4 universities in Eastern, Western and Southern African countries to show that the current dominant mode of teaching in the region’s engineering faculties and colleges is not transformative. This is because many schools’ interests are more on percentage pass rates than on deep understanding (e.g. see [16–18]). The purpose is partly to give a theoretical basis for the case studies but more importantly, to create a clear understanding of where the students in the cases are coming from
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