InnovEd4TS Field Mission #2 “IngénieuxSud” meets at UCLouvain

After having held its first virtual visit in Oslo, the peer experts of the InnovEd4TS – Innovative Education for Transferable Skills – Strategic partnership met the team of the “IngénieuxSud” Initiative at UCLouvain. A collaborative tool, “the booklet” supported the participants in their deliberations.

Members of Ingénieux Sud class academic year 2018-2019

Due to the global pandemic, the flagship visit at UCLouvain had to be held remotely. It marked the second virtual initiative from the Strategic Partnership InnovEd4TS, joining together the five member universities of the Circle U. Alliance (Humboldt, UCLouvain, Oslo, Aarhus and Paris) along with the University of Lisbon.

IngénieuxSud is a course organised by the UCLouvain in partnership with NGOs. Every year, it enables around 150 students from Belgium and universities of the South to work together on 25 concrete and sustainable projects. IngénieuxSud won the Global Education Innovation Award in 2017.

Transferable Skills developed in the IngénieuxSud initiative :

Strategic Partnership InnovEd4TS (Innovative Education for Transferable Skills), is five member universities of Circle U. Alliance : Humboldt University, UCLouvain, University of Oslo, University of Aarhus and Université Paris Cité along with the University of Lisbon

Critical Thinking

Interdisciplinarity

Intercultural understanding 

Drawings by Benoît Raucent

An educational project serving a balanced and fair collaboration between Northern and Southern Partners

IngénieuxSud is a cooperation between UCLouvain and the university NGO Louvain Coopération. It is a multidisciplinary course which offers students from UCLouvain and from its partner institutions in Africa, Asia and South America, the opportunity to work together on 25 concrete and sustainable projects in collaboration with local partners and NGOs.  Students receive five ECTS per academic year and meet for two hours a week. Professors and experts from universities and NGOs in the North and the South supervise them.

Over the course of one academic year, students research a technical issue (on water, agro ecology, energy, etc.) in a Southern country, identified by associations, cooperatives or NGOs which are in direct contact with the local population. They look for appropriate and sustainable solutions to the challenges formulated by local actors. Then, they carry out a one-month internship in the field during summer to implement, together, the envisaged solutions. IngénieuxSud contributes to building the capacity of students and teachers to make decisions in favour of environmental integrity, economic viability and a fairer society for present and future generations globally.

Transferable skills for a “service-learning approach”

Intercultural understanding is at the heart of IngénieuxSud, given a high focus on communication and cooperation between the Belgian students and the local community of students and partners.  

Stéphanie Merle, member of the Louvain Coopération NGO and co-founder of the IngénieuxSud initiative, explains that “beyond the traditional classroom, a ‘service-learning approach’ is implemented, a concept inherited from the United States, which concentrates on collaboration with local actors”.

Critical thinking develops through lectures, debates, practical exercises, workshops and field interactions. Ultimately, students are able to think globally and become aware of the interdependence of technical and non-technical issues, such as economic and socio-cultural challenges, when trying to solve problems.

Jean-Pierre Raskin, professor at the Louvain School of Engineering and co-founder of the IngénieuxSud initiative, emphasizes the need at the beginning of the project to present students not directly with the problems to be solved but with the global themes to be explored: “The themes that we and our local partners propose to our students should be general. On this basis, we put them in contact with cooperatives and NGOs locally and they all define the objectives together. If from the very beginning we present students with very technical problems, they jump on the technical solutions and it is then difficult to make them see the problems from another angle“.

IngénieuxSud also encourages the development of interdisciplinary skills. The student teams are interdisciplinary and present their technical solution before a transdisciplinary panel of professors from UCLouvain and the partner universities.

Yvan Larondelle, professor at the Faculty of Biosciences Engineering at UCLouvain, highlights this aspect of the project: “when we opened IngénieuxSud to our students from the Faculty, there was great interest,” he says. “One of the main advantages of the IngénieuxSud project is that we can put engineering students in contact with biologists and even students in humanities. This makes it possible to build an interdisciplinary team“.

Experts from the six member universities of InnovEd4TS were very enthusiastic about the initiative, which they say also allows students to develop other transferable skills such as teamwork but also problem solving, from taking a systemic approach to problems to building prototypes. Grégoire Le Brun, teaching assistant of the IngénieuxSud initiative, described the methodological support students receive to help them structure the complexity of the project into a written final report (workshops on concept implementation, on project management, …).

The experts also suggested that global citizenship, i.e. the ability to think as world citizens, to consider global problems on the basis of a deep understanding of various values and to promote the well-being not only of oneself but also to contribute to the well-being of others, is also a skill developed by the students of IngénieuxSud.

Challenges contributing to learning outcomes

In most projects, despite careful preparation and hard work in advance, students reveal that challenges arise once they are on site.

Benoît Herman, professor at the Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering at UCLouvain describes the challenges students face: “Often, this is the first time that students are confronted with a real-world problem, there is not a single solution, perhaps not like the mathematical problem they are used to. It takes them out of their comfort zone. In Belgium, their creativity is the limit – in the South, technical possibilities offer new limits and they have to adapt“.

Margo, a student who participated in IngénieuxSud two years ago with a project in Benin, had an incredible experience and is still very proud of the result. She explains: “The local students were very committed from the beginning. They were there for six weeks – the team consisted of all six of us, not just the four Belgian students. It didn’t go perfectly, you have to solve problems that you don’t expect, we learned a lot from the experience”. “Another important learning experience was oral communication,” she says. 

For an engineering student like Alex, IngénieuxSud taught him to ask “why” in addition to the usual “how”. He quickly discovered that he was developing a certain resourcefulness and learned what to do when mistakes were made. Learning to plan from scratch was one of the main learning outcome that he used afterwards.

Haddy Mbuyi, associate professor at the University of Kinshasa pointed at the fact that the common language (French) was of great help to facilitate communication and exchanges between students.

The way forward

The two-day meetings were engaging and valued by all the participants. Feedback was shared and led to rich exchanges with the panel of experts. Additional transferable skills proposed by the expert panel allowed the group to debate and reflect. Based on the work provided by faculty and students, experts also suggested that the initiative would perhaps be worth more than five ECTS.

IngénieuxSud is clearly a program that requires commitment on the part of students but it also meets their learning needs and provides a challenging and rewarding experience for them.