Toward Bidirectional Faculty Development: A Collaborative Model for Designing and Implementing Faculty Trainings on Evidence-Based Strategies for Supporting Student Learning in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

This evidence-based practice paper describes a collaborative, bidirectional faculty development project implemented by engineering faculty from Malawi and the United States. The aim of the project was improving undergraduate educational practices at a university in Malawi by integrating active learning strategies across the undergraduate engineering curriculum and catalyzing curricular transformation. First this paper describes the framework used for the project, and then it describes how it was applied for the design and implementation of a week-long faculty development workshop for 52 engineering faculty and staff from two universities in Malawi. This project was collaboratively implemented by a faculty team from Malawi and the United States in a way that facilitated bi-directional exchange between facilitators and participants. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a novel perspective on engineering faculty development programs that have been collaboratively designed, developed, and implemented by partners in a low-income country (LIC), i.e., Malawi, and high-income country (HIC), i.e., the United States. Often models for global faculty development involve a one-way transfer of knowledge from higher-resourced to lower-resourced settings (Olayemi, et al., 2021), despite increased calls for bidirectional exchanges between faculty in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries. Further, such models are not usually evaluated for whether they are best framed for LMICs. These kinds of unilateral and untested models create problematic power imbalances between partners, prohibit parity in educational experiences for engineering faculty in LMICs and may not lend themselves well to eventual self-sustaining efforts among faculty in LMICs. As a result, engineering educators in LMICs often lack access to workshop-style faculty development training, including training on evidence-based instructional strategies to improve student learning. From the perspective of faculty facilitators, this paper offers practical reflections on culturally-relevant translation and integration of active learning in a low-income country.