Helping Them Helps Us! A Case Study: How Developing Academic Programs in the Developing World Makes us Better Teachers Back Home

摘要

For the past five years, the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado have helped to create, develop and build an undergraduate academic program at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA). One of the most successful parts of the program development has been the creation of the Civil Engineering core curriculum and major. The authors, all West Point engineering instructors involved with NMAA's civil engineering development, discovered many benefits from providing this academic assistance which improved their teaching abilities. While our original mission was focused on faculty, curriculum, and course development, we soon encountered numerous challenges that ultimately improved our educational skills. We quickly found ourselves deeply involved in department level planning and decision-making, complete laboratory setup and training, computer software setup and training, infrastructure assessment, faculty hiring, supply acquisition, and student development. Many of these critical, additional tasks were unfamiliar to us, since they are typically done by other senior administrators or by those in specialized jobs within our department. We were also challenged with ensuring NMAA instructors could adequately explain material to those for who English is a second language, convincing them that our advice was in the best interest of student learning, and continually making changes on the fly. This paper will detail the challenges we faced and investigate the correlation that exists between our unique experiences and our development as faculty members, stressing those things we brought back that have enhanced our teaching in the US. While our efforts were focused on one program, in one country, these lessons could be applied to any faculty members building educational programs elsewhere in the developing world.