Teaching Outside Your Expertise Is Not Teaching

As educators, our primary objective is to provide impactful learning experiences that reflect our areas of expertise. Assigning faculty to teach subjects outside their specialisation undermines that objective and jeopardises the quality of education.

Teaching is more than delivery

Teaching transcends content delivery. It involves interpreting the subject matter and helping students navigate its intricate concepts. Assigning courses to people who lack in-depth knowledge of the subject is not only pedagogically unsound but unprofessional, and it harms students and faculty alike. Universities must prioritise aligning courses with faculty expertise if they want genuine learning environments.

The economics behind it

We understand the economics of education. But too often these practices are pushed through by stubborn administrators to save money, while the official narrative of student-centred learning, teacher well-being and rising motivation carries on regardless. How can we expect engagement and integration when we do not respect, or seriously consider, the faculty profile?

Once again, K-12 practices are being transferred blindly, perhaps purposefully, into higher education: a teacher of English can also teach history, geography, humanities, social sciences or mathematics, whether in Year 5, 7 or 11. That, unfortunately, is the mindset we are in.

Curriculum Is Conversation: The Hidden Curriculum of Course Allocation

It has been a while since my last post; my reflective faculties were temporarily suspended, as happens for many reasons. Today I want to raise an issue that keeps coming up among colleagues in pedagogical and educational networks, particularly in the MENA region: the way 'hidden curriculum practices' are managed within departments.

'Operational Practices' with Unearned Legitimacy

This concern is far less prevalent in countries where the identities and well-being of faculty and administrators alike are acknowledged and respected. In the forums I follow, there is palpable dissatisfaction. Administrators tend to call these practices 'operational and local', which grants them a legitimacy they have not earned, especially when we recall Applebee's (1996) argument that curriculum is conversation, above all in higher education.

Assigning a Course Is Not an Administrative Act

It is not enough to hand a course to a faculty member without a meaningful dialogue, and without a proper look at their CV and professional profile. At college and university level, administrators frequently apply curriculum practices left over from K-12 schooling, which is inappropriate. It may serve the administration's interests by fostering a hierarchy that undermines faculty autonomy, usually justified as 'unit, faculty or departmental needs'. Administrators must invest more in the selection and allocation process: understand instructors' profiles, talk to them, and stop relying on exclusively quantitative and meaningless variables. Assigning a course without essential quality assurance criteria is fundamentally anti-pedagogical.

Faculty communities across the region confirm this, if not extensively. I can attest to it myself, having visited and worked in universities where such practices are widespread, with only a few exceptions. Those exceptions probably reflect the cultural beliefs and philosophy of each institution.

Rethinking Assessment in the Age of AI

Rethinking assessment in the age of AI is now essential for anyone in higher education or K-12. Assignments and homework, in particular, need re-evaluating.

From Product to Authentic Assessment

Product-based assessment should be reshaped through more authentic methods: case studies, peer-to-peer discussion in class, mind mapping, oral presentations, recorded videos and podcasts. We should also set critical thinking assignments in which the thinking is presented visibly and publicly, for instance in peer-to-peer interaction.

In courses centred on writing, essays, translation or commentary, assessment should be combined with other authentic activities, typically by pairing oral or visual artefacts with traditional techniques. Another innovative approach is to assess the process a student goes through to produce the work. A record of the prompts they used, for example, lets educators see the intellectual investment and reasoning behind the final submission.

What It Will Take

Implementing these changes demands significant pedagogical and philosophical shifts across the education sector, in K-12 and higher education alike. That may mean teaching assistants or tutors to maintain a workable student-to-teacher ratio, or reduced teaching loads so that faculty have the time to create authentic, high-quality learning environments.

The need for political will inside institutions is evident when we consider the realities of higher education today, especially in regions such as the GCC. Faculty development opportunities must be established, and class sizes and faculty workloads reconsidered to fit the new assessment methods, including training in innovative teaching strategies and smaller classes to strengthen engagement and learning outcomes. Adopting a new educational philosophy is imperative if these goals are to be met.

L'approche-programme – The Programme Approach to Curriculum Design

A video introduction to the approche-programme, a way of thinking about a degree as one coherent programme rather than a stack of separate courses – a useful lens for anyone redesigning a translation curriculum.

Watch: a new approach to curriculum

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...

A Peer Conversation on Competency-Based Teaching

Today I had a very interesting peer-to-peer session with my colleagues in the department, and I was pleased with their interest and reactions. We discussed the relevance of Gibbs's pedagogical approach to university teaching: teaching to enable students' competencies rather than delivering educational experiences that force them to memorise. In other words, teaching so that students understand and perform at the same time.

The core question was whether our educational context allows us to facilitate competency-based pedagogies, which are designed to enrich students' experience and prepare them not only for work but for a sustainable lifelong venture.

The teacher's engineering ability, designing and developing thriving learning environments, seems to be the most demanding criterion in this enterprise. Integrating the experiential model into instruction is another hurdle to clear. Continuous professional development can help instructors lead a competency-based approach to teaching and learning.

All in all, leadership and management support is essential to activate this approach. Without reducing the useless administrative burden and twisted bureaucracy that so often inhibit educational success, at student, faculty and institutional level alike, it will be difficult to implement this important part of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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.

Does Competency-Based Education Spell the End of the Textbook Empire?

I have worked in four universities in the Gulf, and in three of them I lived through the renewal of existing programmes or the approval of new ones. One traditional habit appeared every time, especially in EFL and translation programmes, and even in education courses themselves: the rush to recommend textbooks, as if the entire knowledge frame lived in one or two books. I never once heard an institution use the word "competency" or "competence".

Why Competency Models Are Rare

Perhaps the competency model does not sit well with traditional publicly funded universities. They follow a curriculum paradigm that has run for over 150 years, inherited from primary and secondary schooling, and it usually leads to graduate unemployment and stagnation.

Competency models demand hard work, pedagogical engineering skills and ongoing updating. They prepare students for real, authentic, lifelong abilities. They are more dynamic and more rewarding for the twenty-first-century generation. They stress the link between society, the economy and the educational institution, and they require teachers and faculty to design learning and performance environments tailored to specific student needs, market demands and national priorities. It is a different world, and a more challenging one. Without genuine pedagogical know-how, faculty will struggle to engage with a competency model.

In EFL, authentic, customised, context- and work-oriented learning and performance environments, enhanced with experiential and project-based pedagogies, seem to be the way ahead.

Takeaway

Research is needed to revamp our curriculum practices and create meaningful learning and performance activities for our students. Linking with the world of practice through research and development is a key requirement in this endeavour.

What Should a Teacher Know? Beyond the PhD

A PhD or an MA in a discipline does not, by itself, make anyone a competent teacher. Teacher knowledge and competencies deserve to be discussed, explored and investigated, and nothing should be taken for granted.

The COVID experience added a whole new set of knowledge and skills to the inventory that instructors and future teachers, at every level, need to appreciate and be trained in. This holds in any discipline, and it makes professional development a certainty rather than an option. Research matters enormously in higher education, but pedagogical and instructional ability matters too, especially in professionally oriented disciplines and vocational training. Neither lecturing nor repetitive, experiential learning alone will fill the gap. We need a cluster of knowledge, skills and abilities.

Shulman (1986–1992) pointed to the importance of pedagogical and content knowledge, a key variable to align with when designing and developing courses. With the significant development of instructional technologies, a further paradigm emerged that adds the technology and pedagogy components to Shulman's framework: what Sharma (2009–2012) referred to as the TPCK (Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge) framework, which teachers, instructors and faculty need to align with and implement, whether in K-12 or higher education. It is a more comprehensive and efficient approach: integrated, yet comprehensive and sustainable.

I will explore this theme, in general education and in its application to translation, interpreting, multilingual studies and EFL, in my upcoming podcasts.

Competence in Translator Education Is Not as Abstract as It Seems

Accreditation bodies accredit a programme according to very specific guidelines and criteria. Field-specific reviewers scan the programme at the content level and end up deleting, adding or recommending courses. Old-fashioned curriculum evaluation was essentially about changing course content, as if curriculum were a game of chess with courses and recommended textbooks, with perhaps a scan of objectives and outcomes at most.

More Than Moving Courses Around

Not so. Other major factors are at play, not only administrative ones but the "alignment philosophy" and the relevance of content, intended outcomes and any other type of competency (the intended skills, knowledge and abilities to be developed in students). Designing programmes and learning outcomes on the competence model remains a challenge in many higher education contexts. It is a question of funding, policy and a change of mindset.

The challenge is thornier still in the humanities and social sciences. The competence model of programme design and evaluation is most established in scientific and professional programmes, in fields such as agriculture, medicine and engineering, where hands-on skills and abilities can be clearly documented from the profession, then redesigned and modelled into a curriculum that first aims to develop competencies and only then identifies the content that feeds them. That is an entirely different mindset from the usual methods of building, designing and evaluating curricula in higher education.

And in Translator Education?

My first suggestion is to stop stressing only the traditional focus on the product, the text. Let us bring in translator competences as well. After all, who is the agent, producer and deliverer of the outcome, whether translated text, video or audio? The human being: the translator, the subtitler, the interpreter.

In fact, translation competence is becoming an outdated topic in applied translation studies. Let us move on. The PACTE group has been discussing it for years and has run a longitudinal inquiry for two decades. Kiraly, Göpferich and Chesterman have added competencies missing from PACTE's predominantly cognitive model. We should now also be discussing translator competence, instructor and faculty competence in translation, competence in translation curricula, and more.

Internship, Practicum or Fieldwork? Lessons for Translator Education

Some programmes in the social and human sciences include a practicum or field training before the BA, the MA or, in some cases, a diploma. It gives the learner, the trainee or the novice teacher a chance to gain work-related competencies, although the time allowed is usually not enough, for institutional, planning or strategic reasons.

What I Saw in Qatar

In my doctoral research on two university-based programmes in Qatar, I explored the internship and fieldwork dimension. At the time, the team was developing a guide and protocol to ensure that future translators and interpreters received adequate training through the internship before graduation.

Yet the support provided to those students needed further work. It is not easy for a multilingual professional under heavy pressure to deliver projects on time while also monitoring students who have never worked in a hectic professional environment. The competencies needed in that real-life context are usually psychological, non-linguistic, attitudinal and aptitudinal, and they combine, as in teacher education, with facing a class for the first time and making sure the pedagogical dimension is properly handled.

The Dual-Education Model

In Canada, pre-service teachers, future multilingual providers and learners on other professional programmes engage in dual education: an internship in which they alternate between work (training) and study. Students are at once future professionals and ongoing learners. Their learning becomes authentic, contextual and experiential, and it leads to pertinent outcomes.

Competency, Not Content

Under a competency-based rather than content-based curriculum, the planning of teaching and training should prioritise the list of competencies (knowledge, skills and behaviour) that matter most in the students' learning and performance curve. New and innovative content should be stressed, because traditional content in the social and human sciences usually does not sit well with the competency model. And when we say content, we must add pedagogy and the provision of a thriving, relevant and significant learning environment.

It is not about a textbook. It is about a learning environment that empowers the learner. Textbooks are only one part of that complex yet coherent and connected environment.

Can Experiential Learning Work in the Liberal Arts?

A few years ago I worked at a university in the Middle East whose English department was going through accreditation. From what I heard, the university or the accreditors demanded that the literature and linguistics units demonstrate how experiential learning could be applied in their courses. Faculty in the liberal arts faced a real challenge.

An intruding paradigm

Experiential learning usually lives in the sciences and in professionally oriented programmes such as engineering and medicine. Bringing this 'intruding' paradigm into the unfamiliar terrain of the liberal arts was not easy. Courses that could not integrate an experiential dimension were prone to extinction, and possibly to the closure of the unit itself, whether literature, poetry or drama.

I had a broad idea of how experiential learning could be applied in translation, interpreting, business studies, engineering and medicine. Beyond my own experience in applied languages, I had worked alongside peers in my doctoral research lab who were studying those very disciplines. In educational development, that is how it works: we bring the tools and techniques, then collaborate with subject-specific experts to get the job done.

Learning beyond the fixed room

In a classroom or lecture theatre, the context is confined to a fixed space and a limited time. Beyond it, learning can come from a visit to a heritage site or museum, from immersion in a good book, or from the workplace itself. My colleagues teaching drama, poetry and literature were bewildered about how to build experiential learning into their courses, since what the university wanted was proof of the economic and social relevance of the programme.

So I made some enquiries internationally, and found a professor at a Canadian university who had published three articles on this innovative model of teaching.

COVID-19 and the Global Education Emergency: Planning for Recovery

A talk on how education systems can plan for recovery after the COVID-19 emergency – worth a look for anyone rethinking programme delivery after the pandemic.

Using PLR Articles To Make Videos For Affiliate Marketing

Yes, Online Translator Education Works

Some still say the online model in education does not hold. This year I had the chance to prove otherwise.

I developed, created digital content for, and taught two of the most sought-after courses in translation technologies, plus one course in advanced interpreting, fully online, for an MA programme at one of the best e-universities in the Gulf region, in partnership with Colorado State University.

I lived the experience from scratch, from programme pre-approval to where we are now: our second semester, with two more to go before the first cohort graduates. The content is highly innovative, some of it new to the region. So far the programme has been a success, and many more students are lined up to register next year. Promising.

New content, new mode

In the Arab region, and especially the Gulf, translation departments are not used to hosting courses such as localisation, online interpreting, fully fledged e-courses in translation technologies, revision or project management. These are top-tier innovations in graduate translation curricula. For such courses, students log into Blackboard Collaborate (the chosen LMS) every week, attend a live and interactive lecture, and then complete varied assessments of their understanding.

Diversified assessment is the key element that makes the difference, and it is why the synchronous online model deserves credit. Believe me, learning, teaching and transformation are taking place. Triangulating assessment tools; student-content, student-instructor, student-student and instructor-content interaction online; and delivering assessment to strict deadlines are clear signs of educational practice that creates impact.

So why the doubt?

Why should these learning and teaching experiences not be considered viable? On what basis? Perhaps an ideological, self-serving and narrow interpretation of what e-learning means. With COVID upon us, it cannot be denied that a well-designed online exercise or test should count. Institutional support should also be offered so that instructors can develop abilities and pedagogies specific to online environments.

One last question: what are we assessing, content or understanding? It is time to move beyond assessing the product (content) and focus on assessing the level of understanding, deep or surface (Bart, 1995).