Education in a New Democracy: Combining Student-Centered and Technology-Centered Instruction in the Higher Ed Classroom
Highline
Community College and The Polytechnic of Namibia
Establish the Highly Successful Center for Teaching and Learning
by Kathleen Hasselbad, Highline Community College
"It is confession time: Before I left Namibia for Highline Community College, I was a bit skeptical about what it is we can learn from a community college and whether this program is worth the money spent on it," commented Margaret van der Merwe, Head of Department for Electrical Engineering Research at the Polytechnic of Namibia "I was wrong. I did learn a lot."
What changed her mind? A series of carefully planned, interlocking set of activities that arose out of the needs and expectations of both partners provides the answer.
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| The Namibian team with Highline Faculty Resource Center personnel. (Left to right): James Peyton (HCC), Ed Morris (HCC), Margaret van de Merwe, Stephan Scholz, Vetira Hijamita, and Lucia Kafidi from the Polytechnic of Namibia. |
Highline Community College (HCC), located in Des Moines, WA, and the Polytechnic of Namibia (PON) began discussions on collaborative projects six years ago. These talks led to a formalized relationship, exchanges of visits, and finally the submission of grants to USAID through ALO in 1999 and 2000 that supported the strategic plans of each institution. Both proposals were funded.
The first project funded by ALO/USAID enabled the PON to open their Centre for Entrepreneurial Development (CED). The CED delivers a variety of services to meet the workforce training and development needs of business, industry, government, and community groups. It also actively engages employers in designing and implementing curriculum and assessment, selecting instructors, and delivering education and training services. As a result, faculty needed training in newer, more interactive approaches--which led to the second project funded through ALO.
The second award provided seed money for the establishment of a Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at the PON that focuses on faculty professional development. It was this grant that allowed four faculty members from the PON to travel to HCC at the end of June to participate in the College's annual Summer Institute. In July, two Highline faculty members and one senior administrator traveled to Namibia, where they presented workshops and collaborated on other project activities.
Vetira Hijamita (Marketing), Stephan Scholz (Communications and ESL), Lucia Kafidi (Agricultural Management), and van de Merwe worked alongside 21 HCC faculty and staff. "We want to shift the teaching paradigm of the PON from the present lecture mode to one that is more student centered and learning based," Scholz explained.
Highline faculty and staff provided the Namibian faculty with a number of tools that they could in turn adapt to their instructional needs. Two approaches that seemed especially useful to the PON team were the use of course websites and "input sessions" that allow students to receive feedback from their peers on projects. The Namibians saw that they could use websites to post syllabi, abstracts of projects,
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| PON women engineering students who are benefiting from the interactive techniques developed by Polytechnic faculty as a result of this program. |
links to other useful sites, and peer review and project discussion. As important, students could be involved in the design and maintenance of the sites. "The idea is to get the students involved with each other's projects and to cultivate a consulting attitude," van der Merwe explained.
At the end of two weeks, the instructors had created a detailed outline of a new approach to take home to PON. They accomplished this through consultations with numerous HCC faculty and staff involved in student centered, outcome-based pedagogy, and through observations of HCC instructors applying these methodologies in the classroom.
Kafidi, Scholz, van der Merwe, and Hijamita gave as much as they received. The Polytechnic team visited classrooms and answered student questions on a variety of topics, gave interviews, and discussed with HCC faculty and staff some of their approaches to working with diverse populations. "The Namibian instructors know the challenges of communicating to a multicultural, multilingual classroom," noted Ed Morris, HCC Math Instructor and Coordinator of HCC's Faculty Resource Center that hosts the Summer Institute program. "Their comments during the workshops hit home with a lot of us and pushed us out of our set ways of thinking."
After their return to Namibia, the four instructors gave a presentation on their time at Highline to approximately 80 Polytechnic faculty and staff during the PON's First Annual Staff Development Day. Modeling the interactive techniques they observed in HCC classes, Scholz, Hijamita, van der Merwe, and Kafidi laid out their outline for making Polytechnic courses more interactive and learner centered, with the assistance of their audience.
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| The Namibian team presenting their materials at their Professional Development Day workshop. |
Sponsored by the Centre for Teaching and Learning, this daylong event also included workshops run by Highline's Bob Maplestone (Chair, Pure and Applied Sciences), Marc Lentini (Instructional Design), and Jeff Wagnitz (Dean, Pre-College and Transfer Programs). Having met and worked with the PON Summer Institute team while they were at Highline, Maplestone, Lentini, and Wagnitz presented on topics that supported themes introduced by the PON faculty members in their project, including approaches to critical thinking across a career-oriented curriculum, online distance education issues, and web-based teaching strategies. Each speaker discussed concrete methods of engaging students in interactive activities designed to enhance their understanding of subject matter and its applications. For example, Lentini demonstrated the nuts and bolts of using online discussion to encourage and expand student interaction with each other, the instructor, and the course materials. Wagnitz presented a talk on how to create local enhancements to distance education courses to increase student-faculty communication.
This exchange benefited all parties involved for several reasons. First, the activities built on one another. The PON faculty sent an outline of the project they wished to complete at the Summer Institute a month in advance of their arrival. This allowed HCC faculty and staff to plan appropriate classroom visits, small group discussions, and in depth reviews of the College's support services relevant to each PON instructor's teaching interests. In addition, off-site meetings were arranged to demonstrate how connections to business and community enhance subject matter content and teaching effectiveness.
The HCC team who traveled to Namibia shortly after the PON instructors departed for home was familiar with the primary themes the Namibians would emphasize in their presentation at the Staff Development Day. This allowed the Highline group's workshops to expand on issues identified by Polytechnic instructors and provide a relevant specificity that would not have been possible otherwise.
In the process of the interactions between the PON team and HCC faculty and staff (both in the U.S. and in Namibia), Highline personnel had opportunity to explore the role of education in a new democracy, business culture in Namibia, and ESL issues in Namibian higher education, to name only a few of the topics raised.
"We have much to learn from our colleagues in Africa and our campus has been enriched through these initiatives," HCC President, Dr. Priscilla Bell noted. "We are discovering new ways of interacting with others and have gained new and better ways to address teaching and learning within multicultural contexts."