King Fahd School of Translation
I was in Morocco last week for two events relating to the the role of the university in preparing graduating students for the evolving job market in this country. The first was the annual April seminar at the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies. This year it focused on higher education and the job market and delved into some important issues. I found developments at Abdelmalek Essadi University particularly exciting because I have something of a relationship with that institution. I taught at the King Fahd School of Translation for 2 1/2 years which is a branch of the university, and because a close friends used to teach there.
The universities in Morocco have much more autonomy than they did when I was there, and it appears that the Abdelmalek Essadi, which has campuses in both Tetouan and Tangier, is one of the institutions that has taken greatest advantages of this. It’s outgoing President, Mohammed Bennounna, has done much to transform the institution into one that is responsive to the rapidly changing economic and social realities of contemporary Morocco. Representatives of the private sector at the seminar seemed quite impressed with what has been done, so it seems that the reform is, in fact, movement in the right direction.
Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane
The next stop in my week was Al Akhawayn University (AUI), and institutions that from its inception was conceived as a response to the realities of the modern economy. There was some discussion at my lunch table about how effective a diploma from an Anglophone university degree is in helping graduates find a job in Morocco, where the dominant languages are Arabic and French. I don’t think this is an issue. By and large students come to AUI with proficiency in French, and English is really is an asset in international commerce. Besides, I think the success of the university’s graduates is speaking for itself. More on that later in this entry.
It was interesting how often the conversation at TALIM kept coming around to the manner in which graduates present themselves in the job market and to basic skills. In this, it’s not unlike the United States, but Morocco faces particular challenges in this area. The most significant is its linguistic profile, which is difficult for Americans and others who live in monolingual cultures to even fathom. Many conservatives here are panicking about the increased use of Spanish in parts of the country, yet Morocco is a multilingual country in which Arabic, Tamazight, French are essentially native languages for some sector of the population, speaking purely in terms of proficiency and degree of use among the population. So by the time Moroccans learn another language for purposes of advancing their career or simply a desire to discover another culture, that language is at least a third or fourth language. (It deserves mentioning here, too, that the distinction between Moroccan dialectal Arabic and standard Arabic, while not enough to consider it another language, is also more significant than that which exists between any two variants of English that I have heard.) Mohamed Dahbi, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al Akhawayn, rightly pointed out that the Humanities and Social Sciences best teach many of the skills that the representatives from the employment agencies present at the seminar felt were not adequately developed in university graduates, and James Miller, Executive Secretary of the Moroccan American Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange pointed out that we need to look not only at the level of programs and policies, but at teaching and the classes. Needless to say, I agree. We can teach skills and subjects, but we can’t teach love of learning and professionalism. They have to be stimulated and modeled.
It seems to me that in Morocco, just as there is in the United States, the fact that technology is progressing so rapidly is producing a tension between the fact that the labor market both requires people with highly developed technical skills and the fact that the job market for today’s graduates is increasingly unstable. It is increasingly uncommon for a person to remain in one position during their entire career. Indeed, complete changes in career direction, not just jobs, are not unusual in the US. Complete career changes are not as common in Morocco where continuing education is not so common and it is difficult to “go back to school” after what is considered the appropriate time in one’s life, but movement within a sector can still be pretty jarring. To be ready for this one must either choose some very specialized skill that one can be sure will be in demand for the rest of one’s working life, medicine or nuclear physics perhaps, or one must be sure that one has transferable skills.
In an ideal world students come to the university with more than basic skills in science, language arts, social studies and, if you are really lucky the arts. The university is the place where they sharpen and hone those skills an autonomous individuals in order to become tomorrows leaders. It’s not the only place where this happens, but it is the major one. There is a tendency among American students to either have more than one major or to have multiple “minors,” when, in fact, those count for very little in the job market after graduation. In Morocco students begin to specialize very early and they take few, if any, courses outside of their field. Perhaps the undergraduate curriculum in both places should emphasize less subject matter expertise as the singular or dominant goal of higher education, and emphasize more core skills that are transferable. If you write well, that skill is easily adaptable to a quarterly report, scientific article, proposal, or newspaper article. If you have developed keen analytical skills, they should be applicable to problems in many areas.
These skills can be developed within the context of many disciplines. One doesn’t necessarily have to develop writing skills in English classes or math skills in math classes. For example, both may be developed in a sociology class in which the student has to conduct statistical research and report it, and this is the idea behind “across the discipline” programs. The risk with those programs, of course, is that the skill often gets lost in the subject matter. Are the students really cultivating and improving writing skills, or are they simply doing a lot of writing?
As technological innovation and economic globalization continue to progress so rapidly, there are three new sets of skills that that are simultaneously growing in importance to the point that they are becoming essential skills. I list them here in no particular order.
- technical proficiency/literacy
- information literacy
- global/cultural literacy
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I often hear surprise that I would consider the first a mission of the university for all students because, unless the students need training in some specific field for which specific technical skills are needed, most professors feel their students are already more proficient in modern technology than they are. In fact students come to the university able to use technology for specific purposes, mostly social or related to entertainment, but they don’t come with technical proficiency.
Our job as educators is not to teach them specific programs or to work with certain hardware. Whatever we teach them today will be obsolete tomorrow anyway. When I graduated from college Windows 3.0, Word Perfect and Lotus Notes were the standard software on most people’s computers, and I don’t remember having even heard of Microsoft Office. Today I run Microsoft Office 10 under Windows 7 as a hosted system in Mac OS 10, they system I really use unless I am working in Arabic. I am involved in Instructional Technology, a rapidly growing sector that didn’t even exist when I was in college, and I was way ahead of the curve with my home PC and dial up internet connection. Chances are things will be similar for our students. So at university students must learn they technology they need now and we use the technology we use that facilitates our teaching and learning. Everything else in terms of use, is gravy. It is, however, the job of the university of to help students understand the impact of technology on our world and the social order, to the extent that it can be understood. What do these rapid changes mean? What are they to make of them? Is all technological innovation good? What are the ethics? What criteria should the apply in assessing the value of a new technology. Reading provides a fairly good, though imprecise analogy. Our students come to us knowing how to read, and yet we still feel we have much to teach them about how to approach, assess, analyze, critique and comment on what they read. We don’t try to teach them every book or article as it comes out, or even everything that was written in a given time period. Rather we give them the knowledge, tools and skills to deal with what they might encounter elsewhere.
There is considerable overlap between how I am thinking of this and information literacy and perhaps I need to collapse them into one. It is hard to imagine a more essential skill than information literacy at this time and into the future. Before I rolled out of bed this morning I had NPR slinging information at me through the reporters on Morning Edition and my radio. I also had the temperature outside, the number of new Facebook messages I’d received, and a short selection of RSS headlines on the face of this alarm clock app I am trying on my iPad. That’s information brought to me not before breakfast, but before I even got out of the bed. By the times I’d finished breakfast I had have turned on BBC World News and started skimming through headlines on my RSS reader as well as my email. The sheer volume of information available to us is stunning, and it literally comes from millions of sources, literally. My RSS reader is a good example of the need for information literacy in the modern world. I have several engines set up to search and aggregate feeds on key words relating to topics of interest to me: Morocco, educational technology, Bruce Springsteen… Each will inevitably bring me stories from sources I don’t know and it will bring me the same story from multiple sources. Information literacy provides the skills necessary to assess those sources of information. In an age where information is instantaneously available, this is an essential skill, and very few people are good at it yet.
For example, major media touted the immediate, on the ground impact of Twitter during recent pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran, perhaps to justify their need to rely on it because they couldn’t get first hand information due to the decimation of television and newspaper newsrooms over the course of the last decades. But in fact:
When the dust settles down on the Iran election crisis, we will see that Twitter was more useful as a media tool and not as an organizing tool. We will see that Twitter didn’t really change much in Iran in terms of organizing the protests, but it did play an important role in engaging the international community in the protests and focusing media attention on the protests (see Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy, Daniel Terdiman at CNet and Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW on #CNNFail).
In fact, there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran (Sysomos via BusinessWeek) and less than 100 of them seem to be active. Given these small numbers, it’s quite amazing that their tweets have generated such a multiplier effect via retweets etc.
The final is global and cultural literacy. We live in a world in which you don’t have to be a globe trotter for your life to be impacted by global events. Even the corn farmer in Kansas who may never leave his home state except for vacation is impacted by global events. The price of corn is kept up by food aid programs foreign countries that include corn in them.
Cultural literacy doesn’t necessarily refer to knowledge of specific cultures. Cultural literacy means learning about culture in general and how it functions in society. This necessarily entails becoming familiar with different cultures, but having encountered another culture is not the same as being culturally literate any more than reading a book makes one literate at the level we expect from a university graduate. Cultural literacy implies understanding what forms a culture, the interactions between cultures and how one might approach another culture to understand
After the seminar at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane to run a hands on seminar dealing with the teaching globalization. It was a bit of a homecoming. I taught at AUI when it first opened and it was good to see how it has come along. Sessions were conducted in the Center for IT Innovation (CITI) which has very impressive, advanced facilities. I very much enjoyed the workshop and the interactions at the university. I’ve written before about the the use of technology in teaching about globalization and culture, but it is useful to note that doing so also develops those skills in technical and information literacy that are so essential. In this we see another example of core competencies being cultivated through the teaching of a discipline.
It’s hard for me to imagine that a course in international relations or an advanced language class could not benefit from the use of internet technologies and social media. But in making use of those technologies in the class, we can also help our students gain proficiency with locating and assessing internet resources, participating in synchronous and asynchronous online communications for professional purposes, negotiating cultural differences, etc. As surprising as it may seem, too many students, (and even some professors) still do not understand the that online doesn’t necessarily mean casual and informal, or that IM chats and videoconferences can be recorded and archived.
Well, those are my random thoughts, mostly riffing on topics that came up last week. Stephen Trachtenburg, former President of George Washington University, threw out some very interesting thoughts on the future of the university, some of which crystalize my own thoughts, others which are more provocative, but that is the subject of another entry or more.