Exploring the Potential of a Transnational Faculty Development Model: A Case Study of the RTT Workshop at Aga Khan University

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Education for sustainability: learning from abroad

Proposal

Exploring the Potential of a Transnational Faculty Development Model: A Case Study of the Rethinking Teaching Workshop at Aga Khan University

In recent years, there has been a rise in transnational partnerships for faculty development services in the Global South (Fink, 2013). Partnerships typically involve universities in the Global South partnering with faculty developers in the Global North or borrowing faculty development models designed in the Global North (Allen, 2014). This research is a case study of such a partnership involving the use of the Re-thinking Teaching (RTT) course redesign workshop to build the capacity of Aga Khan University (AKU) faculty members in East Africa and Pakistan in 2017. The RTT workshop is based on the work in faculty development of two Canadian instructors – Alenoush Saroyan and Cheryl Amundsen of McGill University (Saroyan and Amundsen, 2004).

This study adopts a mixed-methods approach to analyze and assess the transferability of the Canadian model of faculty development to a Global South context. It investigates the workshop’s potential to cater to the needs of the higher education faculty at AKU in Kenya, Tanzania, and Pakistan. It also aims to unpack the relational dynamics in transnational collaborations between faculty developers from the Global North and the Global South. Accordingly, three main research questions guide this study: 1. To what extent did the RTT workshop meet its intended learning outcomes at the multiple AKU sites? 2. What were the perceptions of AKU faculty in Pakistan and East Africa towards the contextual and cultural relevance of the RTT workshop model? How does this affect their perceptions of satisfaction with the workshop? 3. What are the merits and limitations of North-South collaboration for faculty development?

The study proceeded in two parts. The first part involved an online survey of workshop participants designed to capture their perceptions and level of satisfaction. Questions were informed by a toolkit designed by the Higher Education Academy in the UK, which provides a framework to evaluate continuous professional development activities. The second part involved semi-structured interviews with three different groups: 29 workshop participants from the three different sites (Kenya, Pakistan, and Tanzania) to evaluate the relevance of the workshop to their teaching practice; 8 local workshop facilitators including AKU staff from Nairobi and Karachi to investigate attempts at adapting workshop content and, more broadly, the successes and challenges of transnational collaborations for faculty development; and, finally the two Canadian faculty developers that co-led the workshop alongside AKU staff in Nairobi and Karachi.

Based on the findings to date, this study draws on the theory of policy borrowing and lending developed by Steiner-Khamsi (2000) to understand global education policy transfers and local adaptations. Based on this culturalist model, this research will foreground the local impacts of transnational faculty education models. It will also simultaneously situate these local impacts within the broader discussion on international education, globalization, and hybridity within education cultures across various contexts.

In studying faculty development partnerships based on models conceived in the Global North like the RTT model, this research is intended to inform future programming at AKU and elsewhere in the Global South. While ‘best practices’ have historically been shared and exchanged across borders, cross-border transfers and exchanges have accelerated with globalization and are likely to intensify given the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that advocate global partnerships for education. However, as Fink (2013) notes, the growth of faculty development programs in higher education institutions has been geographically uneven and concentrated in Western countries. The emergence of ‘best practices’ of education predominantly from Western countries posits Western educational practices as the golden standard against which the rest of the world is to be measured (Niyozov & Tarc, 2015). Therefore, the transfer of such global practices and ideas, especially from the Global North to the Global South, dictate closer and critical scrutiny with empirical research such as this study on the RTT model.

*At present, the data is being collected, and the findings will be analyzed by January 2019. The paper will be ready to present by April 2019.

Author

• Shruti Anandan, University of Toronto Scarborough Campus