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AELLC and DSC Collaboration

Meeting with Dr. J.A. (Annette) Bardouille, President of the Dominica State College, at the Stock Farm Campus, Monday, August 14, 2006.

Dr Bardouille asserted from the get-go that the major human resource need of the College right now was general faculty training in adult education. At first I thought she was talking about the faculty of education and their teacher training program only, but she was actually referring to a training program for all her faculty. There are four faculties - Education, Health Sciences (nursing education), Arts and Sciences (probably based on the old Sixth Form College), Applied Arts and Technology (the old Clifton Dupigny College, I presume) and a Department of Continuing Education, which pulls in faculty from inside and outside the College, as needed (I think).
She said that a specialized adult education program - teaching teachers how to teach adults or post-secondary students - is badly needed. The College is not quite ready for on-line training; it does not have the necessary infrastructure or integrated capacity (especially personnel readiness) to accommodate it and make the most of it. It would have to be a classroom situation - or maybe (optimally) a combination of distance and face-to-face learning.
The idea of a summer institute sounds great. In fact, it can be the culminating program of a yearlong "series" of workshops offered by visiting Dominicans. She would like to see us design a program that can be cut up into modules, or that might identify key resource persons and structure delivery around them. The program should have flexibility and mobility; it must not be traditional or location-bound. Dr. Bardouille mentioned that she had just presented a five-year Institutional Development and Advancement (IDA) plan to the board and that part of the long-term proposal for the College was to offer four-year programs, and to do so using a "virtual faculty". She was proposing that established persons in their field or faculty members of universities around the globe, Dominicans and others, might be induced to offer courses or programs from their distant locations, without having to be in Dominica or to give up or interrupt their regular posts and responsibilities.

Ideas for a Summer Institute.
Dr. Bardouille enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a summer institute. Her main concern is to offer a program that focuses on instruction in teaching strategies and the pedagogy of adult learning. She would like to make it a mandatory program for all faculty. So it would really fall under faculty development more than curriculum development, but she is also amenable to the idea of working in a curriculum development component. However, it cannot be stressed enough that her priority is the teaching of methodology and pedagogy. She said over a dozen times that the faculty needed a solid workshop or program on how to teach adults.
What would be the process? The Adult Education Committee, particularly Shirley and I who have already made a commitment to participating directly (as facilitators and/or coordinators) in such an institute - with the added input of other committee members - need to come up with a preliminary proposal plus a detailed list of resource requirements and budget. We would design the proposal in consultation with Dr. Bardouille as well as in the context of what is possible at our end, given our areas of expertise and competence (and our limitations). A number of things will need to be decided or tackled:

Dr. Bardouille estimated that 80 members of faculty would be expected to attend, although realistically speaking, that number might go down. However, it is probably a good figure to work with because there is a question of whether we might want to open the workshop up to private clients?? With such a large number of potential participants, an appropriate format might be to combine large lectures with break-out workshops. Break-out sessions of 20-25 would require at least 4 facilitators. One suggested time-frame was three weeks, with the third week being geared to evaluation of some measure of participant performance (or some kind of collective self-evaluation process).
Curriculum development can be woven in - for example, a session relating to ethics in the classroom that would address the question of how to Caribbeanize the presentation and discussion of ethical problems. But more generally a focus of the workshop as a whole might be how to use Caribbean or Dominican material or how to engage the natural and social environment of Dominica and the wider Caribbean.

On other matters:
Dr. Bardouille acknowledged the great work Candia is doing with the College through CKLN (I do not know enough about it to report on it).
Dr. Bardouille was also immensely grateful for the generous assistance provided by Shirley through Humber College and their on-line training program. She said that the State College would put a proposal together based on the evaluation by participants in the on-line course and the needs of the College. Mr. Durand, the head of the Faculty of Education, is the responsible party on this. I got the impression that the on-line course was not necessarily well suited to the needs and circumstances of those who took it. But Dr. Bardouille is confident that appropriate adjustments can be made.

Cecilia Green
AELLC Committee Member
Report submitted 9/1/06