Agree or not agree?

As educators, our primary objective is to provide impactful and effective learning experiences that reflect our areas of expertise. However, assigning faculty to teach subjects outside their specialization detracts from this objective and jeopardizes the overall quality of education. Teaching transcends mere content delivery; it involves interpreting the subject matter and assisting students in navigating intricate concepts. Assigning courses to individuals needing more in-depth knowledge of the subject is not only pedagogically unsound but also unprofessional, ultimately harming both students and faculty. Universities must prioritize aligning courses with faculty expertise to cultivate genuine learning environments.

 #HigherEd #Pedagogy #TeachingExcellence #EducationMatters.

Curriculum is conversation (Applebee, 1996), they say.

It has been quite some time since my last visit here, and it appears that my reflective faculties have been temporarily suspended. Such occurrences are not uncommon and arise for a multitude of reasons; this is simply a facet of life. Today, I wish to discuss a significant issue that has been a topic of conversation among many of my colleagues in various pedagogical and educational networks, particularly within the MENA region. This concern is notably less prevalent in countries where the identities and well-being of both faculty and administrators are duly acknowledged and respected. In the forums I have observed, there is a palpable dissatisfaction among my colleagues regarding the management of 'hidden curriculum practices' within their respective departments. Administrators often refer to these as 'operational and local practices,' granting them an unwarranted legitimacy, particularly when one considers that curriculum practices, as articulated by Applebee (1996), emphasize that 'Curriculum is Discussion,' especially in the context of higher education.

It is insufficient to merely assign a 'course' to a faculty member without engaging in a meaningful dialogue with them or thoroughly reviewing their curriculum vitae and professional profile. At the college or university level, administrative personnel frequently apply curriculum practices that are remnants of K-12 education, which is inappropriate. This approach may serve the administration's interests by fostering a hierarchical dynamic that undermines faculty autonomy, often justifying their decisions under the guise of unit/faculty/departmental needs. They must invest more effort into the selection and allocation process by gaining a deeper understanding of the instructors' profiles and engaging in discussions with them instead of focusing on exclusively quantitative and meaningless variables. Assigning a course without considering essential quality assurance criteria is fundamentally anti-pedagogical.

This assertion is corroborated by numerous faculty communities, albeit not extensively, throughout the region. I can personally attest to this observation, having visited/worked in various universities where such practices appear to be widespread, with only a few exceptions I must say. Probably these have to do with the cultural beliefs and philosophies of each institution.

Rethinking Assessment Methods in The Age of AI : Case of language or Multilingual studies

Rethinking assessment methods in the age of AI has become essential for anyone involved in higher education or K-12 settings. For example, tasks such as assignments and homework need to be reevaluated. These product-based assessment activities should be reshaped and reformulated through more authentic methods, such as case studies, peer-to-peer discussions in class, mind mapping, oral presentations, recorded videos, and podcasts. Additionally, we should incorporate critical thinking assignments where the critical thinking components are visually presented in a public speaking context, such as peer-to-peer interactions.

Assessments in courses focusing on writing, essays, translation, or commentary should be combined with other authentic activities. Typically, this involves integrating oral or audiovisual artifacts with traditional assessment techniques. Another innovative approach would involve assessing the process a student undergoes to produce their work. For instance, providing a scanned version of their use of prompts would allow educators to see the intellectual investment and reasoning that led to the final submission.

Implementing these changes, however, requires significant pedagogical and philosophical shifts within the education sector, whether in K-12 or higher education. This might involve providing direct teaching assistants or tutors to maintain high student admission rates per class or reducing the teaching load to allocate sufficient time for faculty to create corresponding authentic and quality learning environments.

Returning to the realities of modern higher education, especially in regions like the GCC, we can see a pressing need for political will within institutions to adopt this approach. Faculty development opportunities must be established, and classroom sizes and faculty workloads should be reconsidered to align with the new assessment methods. Adopting a new educational philosophy is imperative to achieve these goals.

Fouad

Approche -Programme

New curriculum approach

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Translator Education : Pedagogy, Practice and Research: Today I had a very interesting peer-to-peer intera...

Translator Education : Pedagogy, Practice and Research: Today I had a very interesting peer-to-peer intera...: Today I had a very interesting peer-to-peer interaction with my colleagues in the department. I was pleased with their interest and reaction...

Today I had a very interesting peer-to-peer interaction with my colleagues in the department. I was pleased with their interest and reactions. We discussed the relevance of Gibb's pedagogical approach to teaching in a university context. In other words, teaching in order to enable students' competencies instead of providing educational experiences that force them to memorize. In other words, how to teach in order that students understand and perform at the same time. 

The core focus was on whether our educational context allows us to facilitate a competency based type of pedagogies, usually oriented to enrich students' experience and prepare them not only for work but also for a sustainable lifelong venture. 

The teacher's engineering ability in designing and developing thriving learning environments seems to be the most challenging criteria in this enterprise. Added to that, the ability to integrate the experiential model in instruction is another challenging hurdle to surmount. This continuous professional development may help instructors to lead the competency based approach to teaching & learning.

 

All in all, leadership and management support is definitely needed to activate that approach, since it will be difficult to implement that important aspect of the teaching and learning scholarship without reducing the useless administrative burden and twisted bureaucracy that usually inhibit educational success either at the student, faculty or institutional levels.

Understanding by design.... a good example of the scholarship of teaching and learning: does it work in the Arab Higher Ed context....? to what extent???

I don't know, but I think we are way way way far to believe , accept and implement that approach in our region. The purposeful intention ( or may be not) to strip faculty of their identity as professionals, dynamic reflective practitioners  and action research leaders ...are the main elements impeding faculty( henceforth, higher ed educators) in the region we work in to be innovative and engage in  transformative educational exchanges. We still practice and have upon us the policing, inspecting, and negative monitoring practices that demolish and diminish our potential to make sense of what we can do and launch our potential  in research and  teaching and ...also, some community engagement ...etc.

In my opinion a better monitoring of the situation can be done by attracting competent faculty with processional and grounded educational experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning in a higher education context, to get rid of the traditionally inherited curriculum practices from early 60' and which were predominantly used at school level to control the huge mass of kids and excessively monitoring the teachers. Changing the vision and approach is key. Faculties have PhDs and not BA's, and some do have educational training ( pedagogical training ) or extended experience in academia topped with professional development workshop in teaching adults or Higher Ed students. Institutions need to limit that irrelevant interventions camouflaged under the umbrella of Quality Assurance. Quality assurance is not admin only.

 Quality assurance needs to take care of the source of the problem: pedagogy/faculty profile and commitment and also those who believe in the innovative ways to addressing complex problems in higher education/industrial models ca contain production and industrial operations where machines and technology can be used and controlled.... not the case with humans .......paper work and all policy and admin stuff is time consuming and needs to be addressed otherwise, not burdening faculty with it . 

Provide educators chances to get ongoing , relevant and customized training & education in the new practices in higher education, not those inherited from industrial models of education from primary or secondary education context. Pedagogical practices are not transferred from your previous teacher, or are ad hoc, there is a whole scholarship behind teaching & learning in a higher education context. Read the literature. If we engage in that, the excessive and tiresome negative monitoring/moderating will not hold. So, recruitment of key profiles is step ONE. These profiles may be costly. Here we need to make a choice: save our image as a university and reach higher stages and ranks or remain the way we are by using and continuously implementing the wrong practices that will not lead to positive outcomes neither at local or global levels.

The video is just an example of the kind of endeavors and philosophies that need to be adopted to intervene differently in higher education.

Importance of professional acumen for instructors engaged in professionally oriented programs (application to translation/interpreting programs)

When teaching students / training trainees in a professionally oriented college or university context, a very key element is needed in instructor, teacher or trainer profile: professional knowing & doing as well as having a sense of belonging to a either a hybrid or sole disciplinary area. The most distinguished/ golden rule is when the teacher, trainer or instructor succeeds in transferring the doing and knowing of the profession to the students....including developing the corresponding identify ( or what is referred to in education literature with self-concept). Of course , students can not make sense of the new knowledge and practice since they have never been exposed to the environment yet unless they did so via internship or occasional access.

Nowadays , many programs in academia claim to provide future/practitioners/ professionals ( as they say) and this creates a certain type of misalignment in terms of existing human resources and needed outcomes in the program. This is due to the lack of such pertinent profiles. The victim in this operation is, of course,  the student and the institutions image/ brand name......on along term. Therefore, quality and supervision of instructor profile and competencies becomes necessary to guarantee a decent level quality of education and assure parents and society alike  of the serious and relevant mission of the institution. In a public university context, this remains a far reached outcome, at least in most of intuitions. In the private Higher Ed sector, the objective can be reached and fulfilled to a certain level. Parents want to ensure that  clear mechanisms ( pedagogical & professional) need to be in place to make sense of their investments, an that it should be fair.

Last, the ache's heal is in the human factor ( faculty, instructor, student, parents) and not in the object ( content, courses, assessments...etc).  For example, investing in humans intervening in the educational contexts and set criteria for them to practice the profession ( even at private sector level) is a fundamental requirement to ensure quality in education. You cannot provide ' transitioning solutions' that could ruin the face value of the intuition - even if you do so temporarily. It is risky. It belittles from the good standing of the institution in place. Brining in an academic or 'someone in the team' to do the temporary task, although not qualified to do so, may impact negatively on students  and minimize from their motivation towards learning and may change their perception towards the entire department/institution.

The above reflections has application in translation & interpreting programs, especially those oriented towards developing professional and market oriented competencies without neglecting or sidelining the academic component( the practical/less abstract and transferable skills and abilities)

Fouad

Simultaneous interpreting ....fully online!

Last semester I taught the advanced course in simultaneous interpreting for my MA students at SEU . It was delivered fully online by then, but now it is delivered in a hybrid format. I used the interpreting environment on zoom ( you need to pay for it) to teach it. Students appreciated the experience of interpreting remotely and it did make sense for them that it could be done remotely ( I mean conference /simultaneous interpreting). The Zoom conference interpreting facility was the solution to go for at that time and  it did fulfill the requirements of the training purposes and objectives. Zoom replaced the interpreting lab environment and no technical issues were faced during the training sessions.

I was the designer and developer of this graduate course that contains 14 modules, 7 Critical thinking assignments, 6 discussion points, a mid and final exam. I am glad I was involved in the design/development and implementation of this course.

Post-Covid curricular practices: Competency models instead of predominantly product, course or text book based models

Reviewing or developing programs in the higher education education always follows a highly bureaucratic product-based pathway: documents, checking and checking...and another checking, documents and documents checking...ect....or sometimes benchmarking or checking what others did so as to imitate them or copy / paste what they worked on with slight modifications. Not so!

In fact, doing the pedago-curricular engineering work, and work on collecting, documenting and saturating relevant and significant data is not a preferred pathway that higher education institutions would like to work on , especially in the public sector. Similar process is followed in the accreditation process.

Evaluation and modeling models in curriculum are various, yet, the most suitable approach for post covid and todays' context seem to be the one that takes competency  as a framework: what we privilege in curriculum evaluation or review is not:

- The shifts and changes in courses titles or contents

- The modification of the outcomes / objectives on paper

- The religious choices of specific textbooks  as a condition to breath and continue development

Instead, the first things to do, in our opinion, is to reshuffle the process: first document and identify practices corresponding to the disciplines at stake in the context ( especially if it has corresponding professional practice in the local and economy and society ), after that select these practices and classify them to develop standards of practice. All these information can be generated by the data collected through interviews, focus group, surveys..etc. After that, we sit down as a team and align the disciplinary knowledge with what we collected from the profession or real life context of the discipline or contents that are taught. Then, we select and categorize. Then we build the continents, activities, pedagogies, training modes, assessment methods aligning with the new engineered curriculum.

I hope this clarifies the point.

Linking research, training and practice ( profession)...in which way?

St Arnault(1976) gave an amazing allegory to explain the relation between the three axes (research, training & pratice): the three Russian Dolls allegory. The first fat doll refers to the researcher, the medium sized doll refers to the teacher, while the small doll refers to the front line practitioner. His wish was ( in the 1960/1970) that one day,  in a higher education context, to have a profile that integrates the three dimensions: research, teaching and professional acumen/agency. Preferably, a profile whereby the small doll will reach out to be a fat doll one day....a researcher who passed through practice, taught that practice and , last, engaged in research on that practice. According to Arnault, the positivist approach, whereby the researcher with no professional AND pedagogical acumen, does not hold much in an educational context ( especially when researching professionally oriented disciplines).

I think that a combinations of all three dimensions would certainly be the idea profile sought in a modern higher education context. This is like the case of a medical doctor who has been a practitioner for years and then taught medicine at the university in addition to his or her daily engagement in research. The same can be said about another faculty in engineering or sports sciences. A researcher with no praxiological and grounded experience as well as a customized pedagogical approach to teach the discipline, he or she is engaged in, remains hollow in today's higher education context.

last, similar analogy can be transferred for translation & interpreting faculty's competencies. A hybrid profile where both front line expertise in the language industry, the proved expertise in innovative training methods and pedagogy as well as acumen to do applied research ( evidence-based) these three elements would make an ideal faculty profile in translation departments par excellence.....Rare to find though....Not always! This point ahs been discussed widely in a doctoral research paper submitted in 2017. Updated articles are in the pipeline.

Improvement sciences and higher education pedagogy...

In 2021, I contacted the department of education at Western University in the hope to enrolled for my second PhD. At first I thought the ideas was crazy and unreasonable! Yet, I wanted to take the challenge despite all odds. What made me really want to go further is the new area of inquiry that was suggested by my future supervisor ...I  found it very interesting to explore: Improvements sciences in education. This new emerging field did really align with the orientation of my previous PhD ( Curriculum and pedagogical practice sin higher education). I felt I found the missing link.  That was what I really was working in my previous doctoral work: i.e.,  improvement per see of both pedagogical and curriculum practices in the higher education contexts in the state of Qatar ( and other higher education contexts in the region subsequently).

Few months later, sadly, due to extreme family responsibilities and pressures, I decided to place this adventure on hold. Now, I am thinking of either retaking the pathway or engage in an individual self-directed type of study and inquiry into the new field and  produce future articles in the area of curriculum and pedagogy improvements. 

A question that bothers me when it comes to improvement in higher education is the ongoing traditional, standardized and working pedagogic-curricular patterns that still ongoing in such a context. With covid, things seem to be heading the right direction,  a case in point new post-covid mode of instruction, assessments and intervention modes.....The learning & teaching environments are changing. Thus, time , to engage in improving the curriculum and pedagogical practices. We need to lead inquiries into that . A new mindset of teachers, faculty, administrators  and trainers is needed....we might even move on the barriers of pedagogy and start thinking of using and implementing the concept of andragogy ( how adults learn in professional and self directed contexts).

In my case, advocating for a competency based of approach to curriculum development and design is in itself a request or appeal for or think the curriculum practices. I doubt this will be used and bought by mainstream public university settings (for the moment), but certainly the private college/university sector would be keen to explore the new approach such as the case of universities advocating for the predominant use of the experiential and field/profession/market related types of training and development/learning.

I certainly think that the concept of improvement should start from basic education and move on up the ladder to higher education. It is not only a tool or practice , but  a philosophy and a vision that need to be adopted and believed in. 

Fouad