Understanding by Design in Arab Higher Education: How Far Are We?

Understanding by Design is a fine example of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Does it work in the Arab higher education context? My honest answer: we are a very long way from believing in, accepting and implementing that approach in our region.

What Holds Faculty Back

The main obstacle is the intention, deliberate or not, to strip faculty of their identity as professionals, reflective practitioners and action-research leaders. That is what prevents higher education educators in our region from innovating and engaging in transformative educational exchange. We still live under policing, inspection and negative monitoring practices that demolish our potential to make sense of what we can do, and to launch it in research, teaching and community engagement.

A better approach is to attract competent faculty with professional, grounded experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education, and to discard the curriculum practices inherited from the early 1960s, which were designed for schools, to control large numbers of children and monitor teachers excessively. Changing the vision and approach is key. Faculty hold PhDs, not BAs, and many have pedagogical training or long experience in academia topped up with professional development in teaching adults. Institutions need to limit the irrelevant interventions camouflaged under the umbrella of quality assurance. Quality assurance is not an administrative matter alone.

Quality Assurance Should Address the Source

Quality assurance needs to tackle the source of the problem: pedagogy, faculty profile and commitment, and support for those who believe in innovative ways of addressing complex problems in higher education. Industrial models can contain production and industrial operations, where machines and technology can be used and controlled. That is not the case with humans. Paperwork, policy and administrative tasks are time-consuming and should be handled differently, not piled onto faculty.

What to Do

Give educators ongoing, relevant and customised training in current higher education practice, not practices inherited from industrial models of primary and secondary schooling. Pedagogical practice is not something handed down from your former teacher, nor is it ad hoc; there is a whole body of scholarship behind teaching and learning in higher education. Read the literature. If we engage with it, the excessive and tiresome negative monitoring will not hold.

So recruiting the right profiles is step one. They may be costly. That leaves a choice: protect our standing as a university and climb to higher ranks, or stay as we are, implementing practices that will produce no positive outcomes locally or globally.

The video below is an example of the kind of endeavour and philosophy that needs to be adopted if we are to intervene differently in higher education.

Professional Acumen: The Missing Piece in the Instructor Profile

In a professionally oriented college or university programme, one element of the instructor's profile is decisive: professional knowing and doing, together with a sense of belonging to a disciplinary area, whether hybrid or single. The golden rule is that the teacher, trainer or instructor succeeds in transferring the knowing and doing of the profession to the students, including the corresponding professional identity, or what the education literature calls self-concept. Students cannot make sense of new knowledge and practice on their own; they have not yet been exposed to the professional environment, unless through an internship or occasional access.

The misalignment

Many programmes in academia now claim to produce future practitioners and professionals. That claim creates a misalignment between the human resources actually available and the outcomes the programme promises, because instructors with the right profile are lacking. The victims are the student and, in the long term, the institution's image and brand. Quality control and supervision of instructor profiles and competencies is therefore necessary to guarantee a decent level of education and to assure parents and society of the seriousness and relevance of the institution's mission. In public universities this remains a distant goal, at least in most institutions. In the private higher education sector it can be reached to a certain level, and parents want clear pedagogical and professional mechanisms in place so that their investment makes sense and is fairly rewarded.

The human factor

The Achilles' heel lies in the human factor (faculty, instructor, student, parents), not in the object (content, courses, assessments). Investing in the people who intervene in educational contexts, and setting criteria for them to practise the profession, even in the private sector, is a fundamental requirement for quality in education. You cannot provide "transitional solutions" that ruin the face value of the institution, even temporarily. It is risky, and it diminishes the institution's standing. Bringing in an academic, or "someone on the team", to do a task they are not qualified for can affect students negatively, reduce their motivation to learn, and change their perception of the entire department or institution.

These reflections apply directly to translation and interpreting programmes, especially those oriented towards professional and market competencies, without sidelining the academic component that underpins practical, transferable skills and abilities.

Teaching Simultaneous Interpreting Fully Online

Last semester I taught the advanced simultaneous interpreting course to my MA students at SEU fully online. It is now delivered in a hybrid format, but the online run proved something: conference interpreting can be taught, and done, remotely.

I used the interpreting environment on Zoom (a paid feature) to teach the course. Students appreciated the experience of interpreting remotely, and it made sense to them that simultaneous and conference interpreting could be done this way. Zoom's conference interpreting facility was the right solution at the time. It met the training requirements and objectives, replaced the interpreting lab, and gave us no technical problems during the sessions.

I designed and developed this graduate course, which comprises 14 modules, 7 critical thinking assignments, 6 discussion points, and a mid-term and final exam. I am glad to have been involved in its design, development and implementation.

Post-Covid Curriculum: Competency Models, Not Textbook Models

Reviewing or developing programmes in higher education usually follows a highly bureaucratic, product-based pathway: documents, checking, more checking, more documents. Or else benchmarking, which too often means looking at what others did and copying it with slight modifications. That is not curriculum development.

The work institutions avoid

Real pedagogical and curricular engineering means collecting, documenting and saturating relevant data. It is not a pathway that higher education institutions, especially in the public sector, like to take. The same shortcut is followed in accreditation.

What competency-based review is not

There are many models for evaluating and modelling curricula, but the most suitable for the post-Covid context is the one that takes competency as its framework. What we privilege in curriculum evaluation or review is not:

• shifting or renaming course titles and content;
• modifying the outcomes or objectives on paper;
• the religious choice of a specific textbook as the condition for the programme to breathe and develop.

Reshuffle the process

Instead, in our view, the first thing to do is to reverse the order of work:

1. Document and identify the practices of the disciplines at stake in the local context, especially where a corresponding professional practice exists in the local economy and society.
2. Select and classify those practices to develop standards of practice. This information comes from data gathered through interviews, focus groups and surveys.
3. Sit down as a team and align disciplinary knowledge with what was collected from the profession, or from the real-life context of the discipline or content taught.
4. Select and categorise.
5. Only then build the content, activities, pedagogies, training modes and assessment methods, aligned with the newly engineered curriculum.

I hope this clarifies the point.

Research, Training and Practice: The Russian Dolls Allegory

St-Arnaud (1976) offered a striking allegory for the relationship between research, training and practice: the Russian dolls. The largest doll is the researcher, the middle one the teacher, and the smallest the frontline practitioner. His wish, back in the 1960s and 1970s, was for a higher education profile that integrates all three: research, teaching and professional acumen.

Ideally, the small doll grows into the large one, a researcher who has practised, taught that practice and finally conducted research on it. For St-Arnaud, the positivist approach holds little value in an educational context, especially when researching professionally oriented disciplines, if the researcher lacks both professional and pedagogical acumen.

The ideal profile

I believe the combination of all three dimensions is the ideal profile in modern higher education. Think of a medical doctor who practised for years, then taught medicine at university alongside daily engagement in research. The same goes for faculty in engineering or sports science. A researcher without practical experience and a tailored pedagogical approach for teaching their discipline looks ineffective in today's higher education.

The analogy applies directly to translation and interpreting faculty. A hybrid profile combining frontline expertise in the language industry, proven expertise in innovative training methods and pedagogy, and the acumen to do applied, evidence-based research would make the ideal faculty member in a translation department. Rare, but not impossible. I discussed this at length in my doctoral thesis (2017), and updated articles are in the pipeline.

One more point deserves exploring: how we report that we include research or professional scenarios in our teaching. In some higher education institutions this needs rethinking, because the point of integrating all three in one ecosystem, especially in open-ended professional disciplines, is neither made clear nor properly applied.

Improvement Science and Higher Education Pedagogy

In 2021 I approached the Faculty of Education at Western University about enrolling for a second PhD. At first the idea seemed crazy and unreasonable. Yet I wanted to take on the challenge, against all odds, and what made me want to go further was the new area of inquiry my prospective supervisor suggested: improvement science in education.

The missing link

This emerging field aligned closely with the orientation of my first PhD, on curriculum and pedagogical practices in higher education. I felt I had found the missing link. Improvement, per se, of pedagogical and curriculum practices in higher education in Qatar, and subsequently in other contexts in the region, was exactly what my earlier doctoral work had been about.

A few months later, sadly, heavy family responsibilities and pressures forced me to put the adventure on hold. I am now considering either resuming that path or engaging in a self-directed study of the field, with a view to publishing on curriculum and pedagogy improvement.

Why improvement matters now

What troubles me about improvement in higher education is the persistence of traditional, standardised pedagogical and curricular patterns. With Covid, things seem to be moving in the right direction: new post-Covid modes of instruction, assessment and intervention are a case in point. Teaching and learning environments are changing, so this is the moment to improve curriculum and pedagogical practice and to lead inquiries into it. Teachers, faculty, administrators and trainers need a new mindset. We might even move beyond the boundaries of pedagogy and start applying the concept of andragogy: how adults learn in professional and self-directed contexts.

In my own case, advocating a competency-based approach to curriculum development and design is itself an appeal to rethink curriculum practice. I doubt mainstream public universities will buy into it for the moment, but the private college and university sector would surely be keen to explore it, as would universities that favour experiential and field-, profession- or market-related forms of training and learning.

Improvement should start in basic education and move up the ladder to higher education. It is not just a tool or a practice, but a philosophy and a vision to be adopted and believed in.