Textbooks or Powerful Learning Environments?

Institutions, departments and universities prefer their faculty to deliver courses from textbooks. As we know, this aligns with the traditional teacher-centred approach that is no longer accepted in educational contexts, least of all at college and university level. What hypocrisy. So why does the practice persist?

Why Textbooks Persist

First, a misunderstanding of how learning works, combined with the drive to maximise student intake: to maximise profit in the private sector, or to meet government targets to enrol nearly every student, as in the regional universities on the peripheries of Saudi cities. Instructors are then left with no option but textbooks and transmission methods, regardless of whether students reach acceptable levels of learning or acquire the market-ready abilities they need to enter the workplace smoothly.

In a student-centred context, by contrast, the focus is on building and designing a thriving learning environment that engages students and trainees in the educational experience. To achieve that, class size should not exceed 18 students, and sometimes fewer, as in interpreting.

Second, some colleagues, and this is true not only in Arab higher education but also in countries with long traditions of university teaching and research, find the textbook method simple and easy, and most likely inherited it from their own instructors. Yet pedagogical know-what, know-how and know-why are essential for quality outcomes in any educational programme. So is alignment with current scholarship, both in the discipline and in teaching and learning, if we want to deliver distinctive learning experiences.

When it comes to coordinating courses, miscommunication and misuse of syllabuses follow, because some colleagues are current and pedagogically savvy while others cling to the way things were done before, or to concepts that are now outdated and need rethinking. The victim, of course, is the student. Translation and interpreting research and practice have moved fast in the last three decades.

The Alternative

Innovative instruction built on sound pedagogical principles and educationally sound tools adds value to the teaching mission and to student learning and performance. It becomes even more compelling when students see the relevance of classroom practice during their internships. Aligning in-class practice with professional needs is crucial in university programmes, and translation and interpreting programmes, graduate and perhaps undergraduate too, are a case in point.

Takeaway

We need powerful learning environments in our professionally oriented translation and interpreting programmes, to maximise the student experience, guarantee a smooth entry into the profession, and, why not, produce effective, reflective researchers as well.