Experiences of Adult Educators in Selecting Appropriate Teaching Methods in Engineering Courses at TVET Colleges in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

ABSTRACT

This study’s sought to identify and fix problems with teaching strategies used in engineering courses at a TVET college in South Africa’s Mpumalanga area. A Phenomenological, explorative, and descriptive research approach was used to capture the experiences of educators in choosing effective teaching approaches. Convenience sampling was employed to select 10 educators who participated in two Focus Group Discussions in an endeavor to collect qualitative data. These discussions were conducted through the lenses of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. Two audio recorders were used to capture the debates, thereafter verbatim transcribed. A computerized software called NVivo was used to do content analysis and theme analysis on the gathered data into manageable themes and sub-themes. Subsequently, the findings revealed the following five themes: preferred teaching methods, the effectiveness of teaching methods, the relationship between teaching methods and pass rate, assessing teaching and learning outcomes, and factors influencing adult learners’ performance: however, by the scope of this article only three were discussed in the forthcoming paragraphs. These themes demonstrated that some engineering educators struggle to choose the best teaching strategies which meet industrial skills requirement. Thus, the authors advise industry and TVET colleges to work together so that educators can teach adults the essential engineering skills.

Plain Language Summary

In this article, we explore and discuss challenges educators face while deciding on instructional tactics, particularly for engineering courses. The article continues to provide alternate teaching strategies that address students with various learning preferences. It was seen that some of the educators were either redundant or underqualified, which would result in low learner pass rates. It was suggested that they enroll for staff development programs and self-enrichment courses to keep up with the quickly changing state of technology. The government was also called upon to regularly offer in-service training on contemporary teaching techniques and outfitting college workshops with cutting-edge equipment. During FGDs educators complained about the low-quality learners they teach so we recommend that TVET colleges should provide pre-enrollment tests to ascertain that the proper crop joins training especially in engineering where challenging subjects like math and science are a prerequisite. It is hoped that this article’s contributions would find audience in the government, adult learners, adult educators, and the communities surrounding the province of Mpumalanga. We note that successes in TVET would translate to better standards in a given society. The contributions of the people who live there make a society what it is.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was made possible through funds from UNISA M&D bursary.