Transformative Teaching of Engineering in Sub-Saharan Africa

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 transforma-tive 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 transforma-tive 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, multinational 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.