Given the emphasis on community engagement in higher education, academic departments need to become more involved in the community. This paper discusses a number of outreach activities undertaken by the chemistry department at Rhodes University, South Africa. The activities range from service learning to community engagement with teachers and school students in partnership with other interested parties. Teachers who attended workshops reported that their subject knowledge and confidence had increased and they were subsequently doing more practical work in lessons. Practical chemistry demonstrations and workshops afforded opportunities for school students to observe or perform chemical experiments and interact with university students. Undergraduate students directly benefitted from involvement in community engagement through the development and implementation of credit-bearing service learning.

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Indigenous knowledge is approached as an adaptive and responsive sphere of Mother Tongue meaningmaking and innovation, an indigenous epistemic capital that has been marginalised by continuing colonial modernity and an associated urbanisation in Africa. The exclusionary and epistemicidal impacts of colonialisation and the hegemony of meanings imposed in a westernised curriculum have played out as a double blow impeding many learners from relating knowledge to the world they live in and achieving their potential in the sciences. Research on indigenous knowledge and schooling is reviewed to critically explore this premise. A dissonance between prevailing theory, changing socio-cultural realities and diversity in urban classroom contexts is also probed. This enabled us to contemplate a Mother Tongue re-appropriation of heritage practices amongst teachers, their learners and parents as urban custodians of indigenous knowledge and to work with this as situated heritage practices for working with the modern scientific knowledge in the school curriculum to contemplate future sustainability. Mother Tongue re-appropriation is thus proposed as a starting point for a research collaboration to enhance epistemological access to decontextualised scientific knowledge in the curriculum and for exploring how this might be achieved in ways that open up a 'third space' of empowering socio-cultural innovation through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

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