Scholars of a decolonial orientation remind us of the inadequacies of dominant traditions of intellectual inquiry for 'knowing' and acting in the world. As STEM education teachers and researchers at a university in the political South, we experience these inadequacies when pursuing pressing questions of what knowledges, knowers, and languages matter in and for contemporary conditions. We think from place and relevant literatures in this paper. We use notions of coloniality, slow violence and language ideologies to understand dominant thinking about language in STEM education, and the implications thereof. We repotentialise our thinking using notions of decoloniality, pluriversality, fractures, incompleteness, and conviviality. These inform our practice of engaging a plurality of languages and literacies for teaching, learning and knowledge functions. This, towards facilitating student access to what currently holds linguistic and social capital, or towards reckoning with the logics of this capital, and designing STEM communities for relevance and justice.

The use of digital technology has become integral for teaching and learning in engineering curricula at universities. However, in South Africa, many students enter their first year of study with limited prior access to and engagement with digital technologies for learning, which presents challenges for them and their educators. This paper is based on a PhD study that explores the student experience, specifically agency, when students use digital technologies for their coursework in first-year engineering. The key question posed in this study is “How do engineering students demonstrate agency when using digital technologies for their coursework?” The study drew on Cultural Historical Activity Theory as a systemic framing for analysing learning as a socially mediated, culturally situated activity, emphasizing the dynamic interactions between its tenets. An ethnographic approach, which entailed observations, focus groups, and individual interviews, was employed to collect data and answer the research question. By mapping the elements within activity systems, the study identifies contradictions such as mismatches between students’ prior digital experiences and institutional expectations that catalyse learning. The findings show variation in agentic engagement and action by students as they developed their ability to use digital technologies for course activities. The study revealed how digital literacy is not merely acquired but co-constructed through participation in culturally and historically embedded practices where students took initiative to improve their digital skills, used adaptation strategies to sustain learning, and redefined the status quo in unfavourable circumstances.

This study investigates the challenges faced by second-year undergraduate engineering students in understanding Stokes’ theorem in vector calculus, focusing on the misconceptions found in interconnected concepts that form its foundation. Stokes’ theorem involves the application of line integrals, surface integrals, the curl of a vector field, and the flux of a vector field, which are essential for a thorough understanding of the theorem. This article reports on a study conducted to identify these misconceptions through the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the test papers from 47 students at the University of Cape Town who were studying vector calculus. The results reveal difficulties in grasping line integrals, curve parametrization, vectors, curl of a force field, and the projection factor in surface integrals. Our study concludes that proficiency in these underlying concepts is crucial for students to effectively understand Stokes’ theorem, highlighting the need for targeted teaching approaches that address these known difficulties.

This article explores the conceptual challenges that engineering students encounter with double integrals in a vector calculus course. Drawing on previous literature and utilising APOS (Activity- Process- Objects- Schema) as a theoretical framework, this study investigates the difficulties that students face in understanding and applying double integrals. By analysing responses to a written test that assesses students’ conceptual understanding of double integrals and student responses in interviews, this research sheds light on specific areas where students struggle, such as curve sketching, identifying regions of integration and changing the order of integration. Swapping the order of integration in double integrals is the focus of this research study. The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to the enhancement of teaching and learning strategies for double integrals to better support engineering students’ conceptual comprehension and proficiency in this important mathematical concept.

Informal learning is increasingly being recognized as a way to complement the formal curriculum within engineering and provide additional opportunities for competency development while engaging diverse students. Learning about engineering occurs throughout life, via experiential and spontaneous opportunities that inform our understandings of the world. Learning is not confined to the engineering curriculum and class time but, rather, continues informally and implicitly throughout the daily lives and activities of university students. Often framed in contrast to formal learning, informal learning is more as it represents a significant portion of students' time and effort and contributes to their persistence, competence development, and broadened engagement. This chapter provides an overview of informal learning, discussing its definition, history, and settings and activities relevant to engineering education. The second section of the chapter focuses on the benefits and outcomes of informal learning, related to competency development and engagement of diverse learners. The third section identifies implications and provides recommendations for engineering researchers and practitioners to study, integrate, and recognize informal learning as an opportunity to prepare the current and future generations of engineers for 21st-century challenges, via cultivating the requisite competencies and engaging students with a range of backgrounds and experiences.

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.

Contemporary engineering education recognises the need for engineering ethics content in undergraduate programmes to extend beyond concepts that form the basis of professional codes to consider relationality and context of engineering practice. Yet there is debate on how this might be done, and we argue that the design and pedagogy for engineering ethics has to consider what and to whom ethics is taught in a particular context. Our interest is in the possibilities and challenges of pursuing the dual imperatives of socialization and critique. Socialization involves creating opportunities for all, in a diverse cohort of students, to access and engage with the dominant professional engineering ethics knowledge, while critique involves engaging with a range of ways of knowing, valuing, being and using language as relevant in contemporary engineering practice. We identify conceptual tools from engineering ethics and ethical pedagogy in education scholarship for our context. We illustrate how we use these tools systematically to strengthen our reflective practice in a first-year university engineering ethics module to a deeper form of reflexivity. Specifically, we explore the ways in which we attend to the dual imperatives and also highlight opportunities that we miss. We identify as key opportunities design choices such as how we formulated questions and prompts, and how we attended to content, context and language in selecting classroom texts. Other key opportunities were pedagogical choices of when and how to use student contributions in discussion, and what was made explicit in the classroom and assessment. We share our plans to take our learnings forward in our practice and consider the generative possibilities of these learnings and the concepts in other contexts.

Mathematics plays a significant role in engineering students' education. To undergraduate engineering students, calculus concepts are foundational to their engineering courses. One such concept is the double integral. It is thus important to ensure that students not only learn this concept but also engage to understand it and are able to apply this knowledge in relevant engineering courses. This research paper focuses on the following two components: Firstly, the relevance of double integrals to the engineering curriculum. And secondly, students’ understanding of the double integral concept. We present the relevance of double integrals in the engineering curriculum by looking at the use of this concept in different engineering fields. We explored students’ understanding of double integrals and administered a test to 35 second year engineering students enrolled in an undergraduate Calculus III course. In a qualitative study, the performance of students was used to analyse the type of misconceptions they have in double integration. The findings reveal that the students encounter difficulties with graphical representation of surfaces and region of integration. In addition, students struggle with changing the order of integration and performing the integration process. While some of these errors are conceptual, others are really due to carelessness in the procedure.

Technology is evolving at a rapid rate, thereby introducing more complex problems that engineers must be able to engage with. Increasingly complex problems require new ways of thinking, and more innovative, creative, and collaborative responses. To lead this technological evolution, engineers are challenged to engage with lifelong learning and ongoing problem solving. The learning and creative thinking skills needed for innovation relies on an open and receptive mindset – a key component of mindfulness. Mindfulness has previously been shown to enhance creativity, focus, mental clarity, and divergent thinking skills required for problem solving. Furthermore, mindfulness has been shown improve interpersonal relationships and communication – paramount to effective collaboration when working on solutions to complex problems as a team. In this paper, the perceptions of mindfulness and its effects on engineering professionals in the workplace are explored. Data were collected using structured interviews with a purposive sample of practicing South African engineers, and a survey sent out to a larger sample. Data were analysed using content analysis for the interviews and statistical regression analysis for the survey. It was found that engineers believed that consistent learning was a vital aspect of job performance. Findings revealed that mindfulness was correlated to lower stress, fatigue, and turnover intention, while improving productivity, innovation, emotional intelligence, and communication. Results indicate that through cultivating mindfulness, engineering professionals will be more equipped to continuously learn, create, and innovate in a productive manner. The study proposes that mindfulness is introduced at undergraduate level in engineering education as a key skill in preparing graduates for the workplace.

Language use is central for accessing, learning, and communicating understanding of undergraduate engineering knowledge. There is a need to understand students' experiences, interpretations, and expectations of language use - conceptualised as related notions of language and disciplinary literacies - in their transition from school to and through first-year university. We use interviews with nine first-year mechanical engineering students to describe this transition as a to-and-fro process of navigating a continuum of complexity. All students experienced this as a process of uncritical socialisation into undergraduate engineering. Yet navigating this continuum was harder for some, a process that was inflected through their language repertoires and schooling experiences, but also agentive and personal. Students identified an absence of opportunities to bring their knowledges, languages and identities to this process. These findings and our conceptual tools have purchase in wider debates concerned with the transition into engineering programmes in which diversity is increasingly the norm.

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.

Accreditation bodies such as the Engineering Council of South Africa and the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board have a group of courses that fall under the umbrella of Complementary Studies. This term is used to describe a set of engineering courses that include knowledge areas other than the more common mathematical sciences, natural sciences, engineering sciences, design and synthesis, and workintegrated learning. Studies have shown that engineering educators sometimes view these courses negatively. They are seen as distracting the focus of the students on the so-called technical courses, which the educators feel are more important. This paper reports on a research study that explored the way that engineering educators make sense of complementary studies courses within an industrial engineering curriculum. The repertory grid technique was used to explore complementary studies courses when compared to other engineering courses within the same curriculum. The relationships between elements and constructs in the grids were analysed using the repertory grid techniques of principal component analysis and cluster analysis. What became clear was that while most of the educators interviewed did recognise complementary studies courses as different to courses considered as core or technical, what made them different was very unclear. Each educator had a very different conception of what defines, differentiates or constitutes a complementary studies course. This range of variation may go some way to explaining why complementary courses seem out of place in engineering programs by educators and students alike.

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.

Ethics in engineering has long been an important element in engineering programmes, however these subjects are often taught at a basic learning level with little attempt to connect to demonstrative learning outcomes. In recent years there has been a step change in the importance of ethics as an integral part of engineering programmes and is reflected in the text of accreditation documents. In this paper we expand our analysis from an earlier study, which focused on four European countries, to understand the role of ethics on a more global scale. We conducted a multi-country analysis on how and where ethics features in accreditation documents in twelve countries across five continents (Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France/Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA). We identified explicit or implicit references to ethics education, extracted verbs relating to learning outcomes, and compared definitions of key terms. A comparison to Bloom’s taxonomy showed considerably higher frequency of verbs linked to ethics teaching associated to lower levels of cognitive learning. Definitions of terms relating to the process of accreditation were often lacking in documents, highlighting a need for setting terms of reference. This study highlights differences in how ethics is described in accreditation documents. However, more needs to be done to explicitly highlight ethics as an integral part of engineering education. Relying on implicit links to ethics leaves the role of ethics open to interpretation, resulting in uneven emphasis in the translation of ethics within programme designs.

The Western Cape is a dynamic province that is disaster-prone, particularly the vulnerable urban communities in and around its environs. Such communities are more vulnerable to wildfire, flooding, pandemic, natural and human-made hazards because of poverty and, consequently, poor living conditions such as overcrowding and non-understanding of community resilience. The inability of these communities to understand community resilience and withstand adversities affects the sustainability of initiatives to develop them. This study aims to identify the mechanisms influencing the level of understanding of community resilience in a vulnerable community and to contribute to the understanding of community resilience to disaster risk. Fieldwork was conducted in an informal settlement in South Africa. The research study was conducted in two cycles of data collection and analysis. Data in the form of observation notes, document analysis and interviews were analysed using grounded-theory principles. Ten inter-related variables or mechanisms emerged from the analysis. The theoretical model consists of four reinforcing (R) feedback loops (R1, R2, R3 and R4), respectively, which explain how the understanding of community resilience in the informal settlement maps on to the relative achievement systems archetype. Negative reinforcing behaviour would explain the lack of understanding of community resilience, while positive reinforcing behaviour indicates how an understanding of community resilience develops. In addition, the variable with the leverage to improve the mechanisms influencing the understanding of community resilience was found to be the ‘level of public education and awareness’. The theory of how these variables behave in context was represented as a qualitative system dynamics model.

CITATION: Zincume, P. N., Ryan, T. & Shaw, C. 2018. The reliability of commuter rail service in the city of cape town : a grounded theory approach for identifying the factors affecting the provision of a reliable commuter rail service. In SAIIE29 Proceedings, 24-26 October 2018, Spier, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Coursework Masters degrees that are offered as block release programmes provide opportunities for access to postgraduate education for adult students while in full time employ. These students attend structured contact modules after which they return to home and work and a distance format of study. However, these courses are generally characterised by low completion rates and lengthy time to completion, particularly of the research dissertation. While various explanations for this problem have been offered, for example, students’ non-academic commitments and supervisor–student-relations, our particular concern in this paper is students’ reading and writing practices in the transition from professional work practice and Masters coursework to the research dissertation. This paper proposes a systemic design to improve student reading and writing in this transition, and the proposal is illustrated using a block release coursework Masters programme in Management at a South African university. The design draws on interpretive systems ideas to think about the different levels of institutional and disciplinary context that impact on the research dissertation. We also use an academic literacies perspective—the concepts of literacy practice, language identity and power in particular—to think about reading and writing. This design incorporates components that include system elements, relationships, purpose and feedback that facilitate interaction between the conventions of the research practice, what the student brings to the practice, and the agency of the student.

Lesotho is an inland country striving to improve its economy. Accessible education is perceived as an effective approach to economic growth. Over the years, various projects were commenced to improve Lesotho's basic education provision. However, the progress is not satisfactory or stable. This paper argues for systemic thinking and adopts Warfield's interactive management to identify the difficulties in Lesotho's education projects. Interactive management can help stakeholders to identify system elements, structure the relationship between systems elements and produce a diagraph representing the system in question. The core mechanism of interactive management is a binary matrix which can infer the existence of a relationship between system elements, provided that the relationship is transitive. Four root problems were identified through the interactive management process: 'board members not educated', 'poor service delivery by the Ministry of Education and Training to teachers', 'food insecurity' and 'reduced and standardisation of school fees at post primary schools'. The developed model demonstrates how system elements are interconnected. The model has potential to be used as a starting point for the Lesotho government to manage on its basic education problems through the identified root causes.