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.