The significance of context for curriculum development in engineering education: a case study across three African countries

Abstract

Curriculum reform is a key topic in the engineering education literature, but much of this discussion proceeds with little engagement with the impact of the local context in which the programme resides. This article thus seeks to understand the influence of local contextual dynamics on curriculum reform in engineering education. The empirical study is a comparative analysis of the context for curriculum reform in three different chemical engineering departments on the African continent, located in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. All three departments are currently engaged in processes of curriculum reform, but the analysis shows how the different contexts in which these efforts are taking place exert strong shaping effects on the processes and outcomes for that reform.

Keywords:

• curriculum development
• curriculum design
• engineering education

Acknowledgement

Professor Duncan Fraser sadly passed away during the final stages of revising this manuscript. We acknowledge his fine leadership not only on this project but also across so many aspects of engineering education, especially on the African continent.

About the authors

Jenni Case is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, with a special responsibility for academic development. She teaches in the undergraduate chemical engineering programme and her research on the student experience of learning has been widely published.

Duncan Fraser was an Emeritus Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. Professor Fraser's one research area was Engineering Education, focused on improving student learning, both by curriculum reform and innovative teaching. His other research area was in Process Synthesis, specifically Heat and Mass Exchanger Network Synthesis, making use of both Pinch Technology and Mathematical Programming. He passed away in July 2014.

Anil Kumar is a Senior Lecturer and the Head of the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering at Moi University. He has an M.Sc. from the Indian Institute of Technology and a B.Tech. (Chem. Eng.) from Nagpur University, India.

Ambrose Itika is a Professor and the Head of the Department of Chemical and Mining Engineering at the University of Dar es Salaam. He has a Ph.D. from TU-Clausthal, an M.Sc. (Eng) from Leeds University and a B.Sc. (Eng.) from UDSM.

Additional information

Funding

We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity (PERC) at the University of Cape Town.