The module includes research and presentation work on heritage sites as potential tourism attractions and their management and marketing, while at the same time recognises the critical debates regarding community empowerment, contested and dissonant heritage. In 2022, as a result of research and training in the SUCSESS project, a new teaching approach was adopted to more tangibly combine the two aspects of the module (namely management and heritage) by selecting community-based projects that function as a form of in-service or workintegrated learning. Two main elements of the SUCSESS project cited in the Gap Report informed the teaching approach: firstly, challenges that hinder university/industry collaboration and work integrated learning, such as time constraints and limited capacity on both the academic and industry sides, and secondly, in many of the fields’ underpinning degrees, community organisations may be potential employers. During training two of the SUCSESS project, participant groups were tasked with research to achieve specific project goals and pre-determined outputs. The community-based project approach is informed by the fifth objective, namely: “enhanced community development and prosperity due to modern development tools gained in knowledge triangle activities”, and the third project output, namely: “inclusive community development especially in less privileged areas of South Africa”. In selecting to undertake the community project, lecturers in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies (DHHS) at UP worked on the premise that students have abilities and skills that could help enhance community development and that a community project can improve both industry-specific and general soft skills development in students in order to make them more employable (Jordaan, 2020). One such example is a particular project conducted in 2019 by the Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (EBIT) students together with the Centurion Heritage Society as community partners, where the potential for heritage and tourism industry-specific skills development became apparent. The honours degree in Heritage and Cultural Tourism (HCT) at the University of Pretoria is a multi-, inter- and cross-disciplinary degree that includes multiple fields of study and instils various employability skills in students. Aside from the University of Pretoria Campus Tours (See: “Sprinting to innovative solutions”), students also need to complete several other academic modules, including research methodologies, a research report as well as an elective module of their choice in fields such as anthropology, tourism management, history or visual culture studies. An additional compulsory module in “Managing Tourism” specifically focuses on the intersection between heritage- and tourism management. 6.8. Community-Based projects as catalysts for skills development and inclusive development, University of Pretoria 93
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