The Engineering Education Research Network in Africa (EERN-Africa) was created to enable connections between practitioners and researchers with a shared interest in African engineering education contexts.Recognising the importance of developing an African voice in the engineering education research space, the EERN-Africa community has interacted in a dynamic and dialogic way with our own teaching and research practices across diverse African contexts, with an ethical commitment to democratic and inclusive community-building.The objective of this paper is to reflect on the current status of the Community of Practice (CoP), and the challenges and opportunities in sustaining and growing the CoP.A collaborative analysis of perspectives on this emerging identity is presented, using an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology and drawing on collective written reflections and discussions.Six broad themes on the value that the CoP has for both individuals and the group were identified: networking, capacity development, emotional support, impact on professional identity, social and environmental impact, and breaking borders.This paper contributes an approach for collaborative capacity-building in EER through a virtual CoP, underpinned by the spirit of ubuntu.

The inclusion of complementary studies courses in undergraduate engineering curricula was advocated and promoted by accreditation bodies worldwide to 'augment and broaden’ engineering education [1]. This can be understood in terms of ongoing efforts to graduate holistic engineers and has resulted in innovations in curricula globally [2]. In South Africa, complementary studies courses are often seen as providing 'soft skills'-although discussion about the value of these courses seems to result in polarised views from staff and students [3], [4]. Given that engineering science persists as the dominant discourse in engineering education [5], this conceptual paper draws on various theoretical tools to explore the development of a more inclusive approach to complementary studies. Starting from the notion of discourse, we draw on the concepts of structure and the hidden curriculum to provide a more substantive way to think about what constrains student engagement with complementary studies courses. We conclude with proposed engagements to extend a positive hidden curriculum emphasising the socio-technical engineering discourse.

This article reports on a qualitative multi-case study exploring the challenges mechanical engineering students experience during work placement. The study collected data from 34 purposively selected mechanical engineering students. It found that constraining learning environments, ineffective industry mentors, low quality work affordances and negative student characteristics can compromise students’ work placement learning outcomes. It suggests that the coupling of ineffective mentors and constraining learning environments tends to be associated with low quality work affordances. Industry mentors were considered ineffective if they could not perform the dual role of work supervisors and teachers. It further suggests that some student attributes can also compromise work placement learning outcomes. It found that students who are not proactive or assertive often experience low quality work affordances. To remedy these shortcomings, universities should provide pre-placement training for students and industry mentors in the form of a seminar for industry mentors and simulated work placement for students.

This article reports on a qualitative multi-case study conducted to investigate how work placement contributes to the learning of mechanical engineering students. The study collected data from 34 mechanical engineering students undergoing year-long placement. It found that work placement students' proactive behavior influenced their learning trajectories. Proactive students experienced increasing participation as they moved from the periphery to engaging in active participation in their work community and were exposed to meaningful and complex work. On the contrary, those students who were passive seemed to stagnate in both participation and work performance. As a result, they remained peripheral participants for the entire placement. The findings are interpreted to suggest that universities need to help students manage their participation to improve their work placement learning. Additionally, they need to monitor changes to students' participation in work activities and their work complexity.

This paper proposes a qualitative systems dynamics model that explains how students’ work placement experiences either enhance or hinder the growth of their occupational competency and self-efficacy. The model is developed from qualitative analysis of work placement experiences of mechanical engineering students from a South African university of technology. Findings from the analysis show that students’ occupational competency and self-efficacy could be considered emergent outcomes of interactions of the learning environment, mentor posture, mentor capacity, mentor availability, meaningfulness of work, scope of work, agency, doing work, co-participating, participation trajectory and performance trajectory. The explanation of the factors and social mechanisms that influence students’ occupational competency and self-efficacy that is offered by the qualitative systems dynamics model would enable the implementation of work placement programs in a manner that would promote rather than hinder the growth of these two indicators of student employability.

Being sparked by interactions with students in the context of a course called ‘Engineer in Society’, this work-in-progress study explores how engineers conceived of their role during the period of apartheid in South Africa. The literature suggests that engineers consider their contribution to society in solely technical terms rather than in social or political terms. Using interviews with engineering academics, this paper examines how respondents’ navigated engineering practice and academic work. The findings indicate significant complexity in terms of how engineers conceived of their role in relation to society, a relationship that was mediated by politicised academic institutions and differentiated cultural norms. This also has an impact on the notion of the culpability of engineers and the question of whether they resisted or complied with the pervasive and brutal regime of apartheid. Although the study revealed a variety of positions and dispositions taken on by engineers, an interesting stance was that of ‘technical activism’ which involved engineers resisting apartheid by exploiting the liberal spaces that were made available in the context of their engineering work.

This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between communities that conduct research on teaching and learning in higher education, focusing on Higher Education Studies (HES) and science Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). The paper responds to HES debates about the strength of its epistemological base and who belongs to that community, and to a perception that DBER is marginalized in the higher education research context. To explicate our perspective, we describe the origins and trajectories of Physics Education Research and Engineering Education Research, as exemplars of DBER. Using Turnbull, we conceptualize HES and these two exemplars as distinct knowledge spaces, with different histories, orthopraxes and participants, and hence different unifying principles, research foci and trust mechanisms. We conclude that HES, DBER and other higher education research communities stand to benefit from multidisciplinary engagement with each other, because of their different perspectives on the problems of higher education.

Engineering educators express concern that undergraduate engineering students solve problems procedurally without the necessary conceptual understanding. While research in engineering dynamics has focused on using technology to improve student performance, this article focuses on using representations for modelling problem solving in the lecture. This is an in-depth, qualitative case study of the pedagogy of an experienced lecturer in a dynamics course in a professional undergraduate engineering programme at a South African university. Social semiotic multimodality is used to analyse the lecturer's purposeful, contextual language choices. The analysis shows how the lecturer creates - using the available space, media and time of the lecture - multiple opportunities for students to access the valued practice of using a complex dynamics concept meaningfully in a heuristic to problem solve as a student and engineer-in-training. The findings from the case study surface points of engagement on problem solving pedagogy in the lecture space.

ABSTRACT South Africa, with its national cultural diversity and post-apartheid challenges and commitments, finds echoes in the European context, especially considering the imperatives of openness and non-discrimination in higher education. With an historical tradition of excellence in engineering education, the emphasis on supporting educationally disadvantaged learners was a notable characteristic, especially in the period of democratic transition from the late 1980s. This evolved into extended curriculum programmes – where the engineering degree is spread out so that it should take an extra year to complete – which are now in place at all universities across the country. This article draws some analogies with the French model and discusses the source and drivers of transformation of engineering education and training. It examines the potential for structural transformation of engineering education and raises the questions of conservatism and interoperability of programmes at an international level.

A recent proposal by the Council for Higher Education (CHE) outlines a solution to the persistently low and racially skewed completion rates in South African higher education. This involves lengthening the curricula of all qualifications through the insertion of 120 credits of 'foundational provision'. This article provides a critique of this strategy by exploring its origins and placing South African efforts at improving student access and success in the international context. It draws on the narratives of two academics, one a top research professor and the other a foundation programme lecturer, employing the theoretical lens of Pierre Bourdieu to examine higher education as a social space or field. This analysis suggests that the power structure of higher education itself is likely to constrain the effectiveness of the CHE's proposal and ultimately fail to shift the low and racially skewed completion rates that plague South African higher education.

The retention of students to graduation is a concern for most higher education institutions. This article seeks to understand why engineering and built environment students fail to continue their degree programmes despite being academically eligible to do so. The sample comprised 275 students registered between 2006 and 2011 in a faculty of engineering and the built environment, who were academically eligible to continue, but failed to register for their studies the following academic year. The sociological notions of structure and agency were used to make sense of the data. The findings suggest that some students had control over their decision to leave and some students' decisions were dominated by various structural factors. The outcome of the study is helpful in terms of suggesting what actions can be taken in order reduce the number of students leaving in good academic standing.

This paper provides a history of academic development by examining how a South African institution coped with the potent social forces confronting it before the collapse of apartheid. Theoretically, it draws on the framework of Pierre Bourdieu and engages with a paper written a decade ago by Naidoo, who also used Bourdieu to understand institutional change in South Africa in the late 1980s. Through contrasting the habitus of two professors, it is argued that academic development helps to preserve the autonomy of the university field by refracting forces impinging on it from the economic and political realms.

More than a decade prior to the official dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, a number of universities launched foundation programmes to assist disadvantaged students. This article focuses on science and engineering foundation programmes, locating them within their political and institutional context and then tracing the evolution of their educational philosophy. But foundation programmes only represent one strategy for dealing with educational disadvantage. It is therefore compared to an alternative model explored in the early 1990s which emphasised the ‘infusion\' of academic development principles into the mainstream. This provides a backdrop for considering the educational effectiveness of the foundation programmes that have recently proliferated as a result of the Department of Education\'s latest funding strategy. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 22 (4) 2008: pp. 799-816

In this paper, we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view of learning implies that success in engineering studies needs to be defined with particular reference to the sorts of identities that students develop and how these relate to identities in the world of work. In order to achieve successful learning in engineering, we need to recognise the multiple identities held by our students, provide an authentic range of engineering-related activities through which students can develop engineering identities and make more explicit key aspects of the discourse of engineering of which lecturers are tacitly aware. We include three vignettes to illustrate how some of the authors of this paper (from across three different institutions) have applied this perspective of learning in their teaching practice.

This article examines the usefulness of the theoretical framework of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to institutional change through data gathered in some initial interviews at Emerston University, a previously white, English‐medium, South African institution. This exploration is based on Bourdieu's concept of a social space as a field, and analyses the different forms of power for which agents are competing, taking into account their social trajectory and disposition through the notion of habitus. The context for this study is a foundation programme at Emerston, an academic development initiative that has a complex social history, one that is intertwined with the agendas of industry and influences from the political realm. Bourdieu's theoretical tools appear to be effective in revealing the dynamics of the social space of higher education, and providing a socio‐historical contextualisation of the struggles working to conserve or transform the structure of the field.