Duncan Fraser was Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, where he was also a founder and director (2000–2005) of the Centre for Research in Engineering Education. Dr. Fraser was also a founding member of the African Engineering Association (AEEA), and in 2011 was elected Vice President of the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES). His research interests focused on improving student learning through curriculum reform and improved teaching practices.

This profile was authored by Cheryl Allendoerfer, University of Washington, based on an interview with Dr. Fraser in 2014.

Dr. Duncan Fraser (1946–2014)

Professor of Chemical Engineering
University of Cape Town

Ph.D., Turbulent Air Flow, University of Cape Town, 1977
B.Sc. (Eng.), Chemical Engineering, University of Cape Town, 1967

Finding encouragement for teaching and research

I was always interested in teaching.  I did a Ph.D. because I thought I might want to be an academic and regarded that as the base level to get in.  I worked for a few years in an oil refinery, then I got a job back at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and it was very interesting that, in the interview, they were more concerned about my industrial experience than about my Ph.D.  That’s something I keep going back to as an educator: that I have actually been out there and done it.  No matter how bright the students are, that’s one thing they can’t have over you.  So a very foundational thing as an educator is to have that real-life experience.  Every academic should get out of academia and see what the rest of the planet is about.

My first exposure to anything formal on education was when I was invited to go to an academic teaching workshop at UCT’s medical school.  That was such an amazing experience, spending two days thinking about your teaching.  Then the next really significant thing for me was going on sabbatical at Imperial College in London.  For the first time, I met other people who were engineering majors in my own discipline who were actually interested in education.  That was very informative and encouraging, because not many of my colleagues seemed to display any interest in the education side of things.  They were more interested in technical research.  That workshop informed my thinking and shaped me, and there are still things that I learned there that I use today.

Somewhere during this journey, I realized that if I wanted people to take me seriously on educational things, I needed to do research in engineering education, because we’re a research-intensive institution.  They respect and they understand research. So the amazing thing is they listen to us!

Changing engineering education in the South African context

When I came back from that sabbatical at the end of 1985, we were just starting to have black African students admitted to our engineering programs at UCT. Historically, in South Africa during apartheid, black African students were generally not allowed to enter the white universities. With all the engineering programs at white universities, this meant there were no black African students studying engineering in South Africa. In the early 1980s, they started to open things up.  We had had some students who, in our country, were designated “colored” (mixed race) and Indian who were allowed to study at a white university like ours, provided they were doing engineering.  So if they dropped out of engineering and went to science, they had to go off to the university designated for their ethnic group.  About 10% of our students were of those kinds of backgrounds, and they really struggled because of the differential school education.  But they wouldn’t give up on engineering, because if they did, they had to leave UCT and go to one of the other schools.

Then in the early 1980s, we began to have increasing numbers of black African students, and they were struggling terribly.  When I came back from my sabbatical, I taught our foundational second-year course.  In the next two years, I had 16 black African students in the course.  Out of those 16, only two passed and both of them only passed the second time around.  That made me sit up and think, “This is unacceptable.  We have to do something to help these students cope better.”  Then I read about collaborative study groups.  I had never met anyone who’d done it, but I tried it.  We had afternoon-long tutorials, where students were given problems to work on, and they could get some help from the graduate assistants.  It was a live experience of learning together, and it was just amazing.  On the first afternoon, you could have heard a pin drop.  The students just kept going for three hours solid, they were so engaged. The next year, we did it again, and I was able to track the improvement in the success of all of the students.

A year or two later, the university was able to get funding to add a permanent position in chemical engineering education. We eventually appointed Jenni Case, who had a master’s degree in science education, and we felt she would make an intellectual contribution to the field—which certainly has proved to be true.  Jenni and I have worked together since 1996, and it’s been the most amazingly productive relationship, because I have many years of teaching experience in the discipline, and she came in with science and science education background. She has since done a Ph.D. in engineering education and has become a leader in the field.  We needed someone with education expertise.  We were amateurs, playing with stuff we didn’t really know a lot about. Our colleagues get very upset with us because we’re always ahead of everybody else, and we say to them, “But hang it all.  We had somebody in our department for upwards of 13 years before any of you had anyone specifically with education expertise.  If we weren’t ahead of you, what on earth were we doing all those years?”

Another thing that really shaped me was the fact that I grew up in South Africa at a time when it was isolated because of apartheid, so you couldn’t easily travel.  What drove me was that I needed to get out into the world to try and find out what was going on.  That’s how I would be able to learn and improve.  So my sabbatical at Imperial College was really important from that point of view.  In the early ’90s, I started going to engineering education conferences, and I’ve traveled the world.  I’ve met lots of good friends, we’ve spoken about our work, learned about what other people do.  What I’ve discovered more recently is that I think, in a developing country, we’ve got much more in common with other developing countries than we have with the first world. The kinds of issues we face in our education, the kinds of problems that our students face, are very different from first-world students’.  I feel like in South Africa, I sit in a unique position, at a juncture between the first and the third worlds, with aspects of both in our country, mixed up.  So I felt my mission was to try and take the best things from the first world, implement them in our context, learn what I can, and then help transfer that learning to other people.

Finding community, building community

In the beginning, it was a lonely road. There wasn’t much encouragement. There were one or two people in other departments that I connected with a bit, but not for long.  It was tough, because if you focus on education and not on research, you find all these youngsters come in, they get research going, and they get promoted. It was hard seeing young people being promoted and you had to wait many more years to be able to get there. I just put my head down and kept going, because that’s what I believed in.

Now at UCT, we have an amazing group of people at the Centre for Research in Engineering Education (CREE), and we’ve encouraged each other.  We’ve learned about educational theories and frameworks.  We had a reading group and did video conferences with people in Sweden, and that kind of kick-started us getting our teeth into some deeper educational things.  We’ve had four or five faculty in the engineering school who have actually done Ph.D.s in engineering education, and we’ve had a number of master’s students come through.  The whole thing has been building up and building up, and it’s got a very strong profile within the faculty.

Richard Felder has also been an influence.  We had him come out and run a couple of effective teaching workshops.  I’ve got on very well with Rich and respect him very highly, and now we’re really good mates, actually.  I suppose I’ve modeled myself on him a bit.  He was an inspiration to me.

Working with Jenni Case has been really significant.  She actually has far outstripped me in terms of educational research.  I’m not really an expert in the field, whereas she is.  We have a very unusual department, because there was a point, shortly after Jenni joined us, where suddenly there was a complete shift in the attitude of the staff to the students.  If I could understand what caused that shift, I could make a lot of money helping other people make that shift.

A spectrum of impact

Students: I think I’ve had an impact on more students than many people at the executive level—heads of departments and people like that. To me, that’s the biggest satisfaction: that I’ve changed students’ lives by what I’ve done.  That satisfaction is knowing that you made a difference to students—that you’ve helped them on the way to whatever their goals were. If I have a regret, it’s that I think our students have still been overloaded. But I think our new group is trying to address that.  We have the cream of the crop coming into our program, and I think they leave with the best education they could possibly have had…and we’re trying to make it even better. We try to keep improving.  It’s not going to stay good if you just let it kind of stay the same.

The Broader Community:  We have run a number of engineering education conferences here in South Africa over the years, and at one stage, I was asked to look at establishing an organization, a South African engineering education association. I concluded that the only way that would happen is if I would do it, but I didn’t see myself having the energy to do that solo, and I didn’t see other support around me, so the idea got dropped. Recently, they’ve actually started it—now called the South African Society for Engineering Education (SASEE). There are a whole lot of people involved, and it’s much better than if I had tried to do it on my own.  In 2008, I organized an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Global Colloquium here in Cape Town, when ASEE was still doing global colloquia.  I’m currently involved in the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies, and I’m actually the president-elect of that organization. I’ve also been involved in the Research and Engineering Education Network, which runs the Research in Engineering Education Symposia.  So I suppose somewhere along the line, I and a group of people here at UCT have contributed to something being established here in South Africa.

You’ve just got to make it happen.

Be persistent.  Keep pushing on, even when it’s tough, even when there are very few people that seem to be on your side.  In the end, you will get there.  If you give up, nothing will happen. You’ve also got to be able to sacrifice a few sacred cows.  For example, we’ve dropped half the physics from our curriculum.  We had big fights in trying to get our core material reduced, and we had to throw things out in order to achieve bigger objectives.  You’ve got to do what’s right and what you think is best.  If it really is good, then other people will recognize it and will follow.  Also, if you’re ahead, don’t think you’re going to stay ahead.  You’ve got to keep making your initiatives, improving things, otherwise you’re going to fall behind.  That was a lesson for me that I’ve taken to heart.  “Continuous improvement,” I suppose they call it in the industry.

In my experience, it’s tougher to wrap your mind around education things than around technical things.  I can say that because I do research in both.  So don’t think you’ve chosen the easy option if you’re doing engineering education research.  It’s actually tougher, especially because if you’ve come from a technical background, you’ve got to learn a whole new discipline that is very different from what you’re used to.  It’s a tough journey.  But if you do it, do quality work, and produce outputs, then you will make a difference and get the recognition, in the end.

There is now a question of what career paths will be taken by people who have done Ph.D.s in engineering education?  For me, I’m very fortunate that I was able to keep technical research going alongside the education research.  Then I look at someone like Jenni Case, and I think, She will be a head of department one day, even though her field is engineering education and not a mainstream engineering field.  Because of her ability and because of her standing, she can be anything in the institution.  So my advice is to be the very best you can, because if you’re good, you will get recognition.  You will get the accolades.  You will get the positions—any position you want, if you really are capable.  For myself, I’ve not done what I’ve done from any position of strength.  I’ve never been a head of department or in any kind of position of authority.  But it’s the quality of what I’ve done that has counted.

For some of the things that I’ve been able to do, you don’t need a lot of money.  You just need your own effort and dedication.  For example, it doesn’t take any money to do collaborative study groups.  You’ve just got to make it happen.

A wonderful journey

It’s just amazing at this stage of my life to be able to be giving back all my experience and expertise in making something new and something different, to help make even more of a difference to people.  It’s been a wonderful journey. I’m very grateful that I didn’t give up when I was tempted to, to actually get to be able to look back and see that I made a difference to a lot of people and a difference to a department—a difference that will actually carry on for generations to come.  It’s not going to go backwards from where it is now, with the kind of foundation that there is.  So I’m very grateful. Very grateful.

 

Photo of Dr. Fraser courtesy of his family.