‘To go boldly’: teaching science fiction to first-year engineering students in a South African context

Abstract

This paper reflects on the teaching of science fiction texts to first-year engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand as part of a Critical Thinking course that uses literature as a vehicle through which to develop competence in critical literacy and communication. This course aims to equip engineering students, as future intermediaries between science and society, with the ability to fulfil this role in both the contemporary global world and South Africa more specifically through the imaginative inhabitation of divergent subject positions afforded by literary texts. Science fiction encourages students to engage imaginatively with various societal ideas, constructs and possibilities. One of the principles of the course is that reading facilitates empathic responses, challenging readers to inhabit unfamiliar subject positions. In this way, the teaching of science fiction aims to develop self-reflective and critical learning practices, wherein engineering students grapple with the ethical ramifications of extrapolated known science in a South African context.

Keywords:

• Literature
• science fiction
• critical thinking
• engineering students
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge that the title of this paper borrows from the phrasing of the voiceover track, narrated by William Shatner, in the original Star Trek series’ title sequence:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. (Roddenberry & Peeples, 1966)

However, for our redirected purpose, and in the interests of grammatical exactitude, the infamous split infinitive has been corrected.

The authors would further like to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of Estelle Trengove and Cuthbert Nyamupangedengu in successfully motivating others for the inclusion of a literary-based course in the first-year engineering curriculum. They would also like to acknowledge the course’s predecessors, Adina Oskowitz and Candice Kent, for laying the groundwork for what would later develop into its own specialised discipline. Moreover, the authors would like to express their gratitude to Yu-Chieh Yen for her collegial, and often very practical support of the course over many years of liaising with the School of Electrical Engineering. They also wish to thank Vivian Crone, the Director of the Faculty of Engineering’s Academic Development Unit, for his unwavering support during the completion of this paper.

Notes

1. The term ‘Critical Thinking’ – to designate a humanities-based course to develop students’ reading and writing competence using literary texts – was adopted as the course’s name by the Faculty before the authors of this paper joined the university. As far as the authors have been able to determine, the appellation ‘Critical Thinking’ was chosen over alternatives, such as ‘English’ or ‘Literary Studies’, because it was felt that the wider ambit of ‘Critical Thinking’ afforded course coordinators more curricular latitude in meeting the aims and objectives of teaching first-year engineering students how to express themselves professionally and be more open to approaches from multiple disciplines across the Arts. The Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment felt it necessary to adopt a course title that did not share a name with another university department so as to prevent confusion from an academic planning and enrolment perspective. Then, from an institutional perspective, the Faculty wanted to prevent encroachment into another department’s teaching mandate and thus needed to find a denomination that spoke to a multidisciplinary curriculum that could be tailored to meet the learning needs of the engineering student.

2. Such terminology originates from the Engineering Council of South Africa’s specifications for exit-level outcomes for Engineering degree programmes. It has thus become the acceptable term employed by the University of the Witwatersrand and the Faculty from which we write.

3. It should be noted that science fiction is not the only genre taught to students. Postcolonial literature is also a key element of the curriculum, as well as a ‘Reading the City’ component based on post-apartheid writing on the African city.

4. Although only 20% of our students speak English as a home language, it is still the most spoken home language amongst our students, who as a student body collectively speak 29 different home languages. The second most spoken home language is isiZulu with 19.6%. Venda (8.9%) and SePedi (8.4%) come in at third and fourth respectively, albeit within a close margin of each other. This polyvocality can partly be ascribed to the fact that South Africa recognises 11 official languages. The other non-South African languages spoken by our first-year intake signify languages spoken in other African countries.

(Statistics from EBE YOS1 BioData Statistics, 2016; Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016.)

5. The Critical Thinking Component was pioneered by Estelle Trengove, Cuthbert Nyamupangedengu and Adina Oskowitz. It was initially devised as a component which formed part of an Engineering Skills course taught to a cohort of approximately 150 first-year students in the School of Electrical Engineering. Kirby Manià took over the teaching of Critical Thinking in 2008 from Candice Kent, and since then it has expanded across the Faculty, taught in many cases as a credit-bearing, stand-alone, mainstream course. A variety of Critical Thinking and communication courses are now taught to all of the Faculty’s schools, reaching an approximate 1700–1900 students each year.

6. Although the decision to include a blog post (despite it being composed by one of the most celebrated new voices in Afro SF) in a scholarly article might raise a few eyebrows, the authors have found James Yékú’s argument for the inclusion of African perspectives and narratives from digital media a compelling one. Whilst acknowledging the uneven ways in which Africans across the continent have access to digital technologies, he makes a case for inviting consideration of content from less centred platforms into the rarefied air of academic discourse: ‘Digital media through online literary spaces (including literary blogs and social media pages of authors) recast the monologic frame and individual authority of print. What results is a decentred medium, structured on the logics of interactivity and participatory culture, ideas that gesture back to the representational strategies of oral literature in pre-colonial Africa. The proposition that we be sensitive to how African writing is reinventing itself is then a call for an informed acknowledgment of the way the digital metaphors of new media reimagine significant paradigms of both indigenous aesthetics and the ways they are now being rematerialized in online platforms’ (Yékú, 2017, p. 262).

7. Statistics from EBE YOS1 BioData Statistics, 2016, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016.

8. This has been a recommended assessment tool in social science textbooks for quite some time (Gerlach & Hamilton, 2003, p. 162), but has been adapted in this context for literary use in the engineering classroom.

9. The selected evaluative comments provided in this paper relate to anonymous student feedback penned in response to the open-ended section provided at the end of these course surveys. The specific questions to which students responded in the open-ended feedback section were: ‘Which aspects of the course were most valuable. Please be specific’ and ‘Which aspects of the course were least valuable?’.

10. For example, in the 2016 CIVN1004 survey, the course was awarded an average score of 8.47 where the university average is 7.84 (CIVN1004 CLTD Evaluation, 2016).