Fashion’s Khaya Mchunu receives award from DUT Council


Department of Fashion and Textile lecturer, Khaya Mchunu was awarded the Council Award in the engagement category at the Durban University of Technology’s Staff Awards held at Steve Biko Campus.

Mchunu facilitates a community engagement project where second-year students collaborate with a sewing circle from the Durban CBD called sewing for Africa.

The sewing group comes to Brickfield campus and partner with students for design development. The previous projects were done Mchunu himself whilst he was mentored.
“The DUT version was a paradigm shift where I switched roles to being the mentor, he said.”
The learning objective that he had for the project was to enable his students to see themselves beyond design students but most importantly as active citizens and agents in social change (which is a graduate attribute of the institution) said Mchunu.

“A method to exercise such an objective, I imagined, is by breaking the notion of the university structure as an ivory tower that is inaccessible to its immediate community, he said.”
The project is an extension of the work that he has done both in Johannesburg and the Limpopo Province working with members of community sewing projects.

“We somehow took a postmodern take on community work, in our case this meant, instead of students going into the community perhaps the community can come into our space, he said.”
There is a slight pressure of being awarded the council award, seeing as now he has to produce better things in future.


“The most rewarding feeling after being awarded is to keep doing more desirable work, said Mchunu.”

-Mongi Khanyile

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