Engaging Faculty in Professional Development: Lessons From Bangladesh

Abstract

Engagement can be defined as participation, involvement, and commitment (Harper & Quaye, 2015). This paper explains faculty engagement in professional development. Faculty engagement in professional development can be defined as faculty participation and involvement in formal and informal learning activities. These formal and informal activities focus on professionalism that might include exercises leading to the development of knowledge, skills, abilities, values, and self-awareness. Some examples of these formal and informal learning activities are classroom teaching, curriculum and instruction development, training, consulting, faculty/student interactions, workshops/conferences, and academic publications etc. Faculty engagement in professional development incorporates the total sum of formal and informal learning or continuous learning throughout one’s career (Broad & Evans, 2006; Capps, Crawford, & Constas, 2012). Since professional development includes faculty engagement, the paper explores how university faculty professionally develop themselves through engagement.