The Goals of the HALE Collaborative Professional Development Experience

I’m so pleased that the HALE group has developed this blog to share highlights of our experiences in South Africa. As you can see from this blog, our days are very full—with lots of engagement with colleagues and students at the university, with planning for our work each day, and with the various experiences designed to help us all learn about South Africa generally, and higher education specifically, from many different perspectives.

I thought it might be helpful for me to add some comments that shed light on our experiences within the broader framework of our purposes for this trip. The trip is designed as a collaborative professional development experience. We approach the trip from the perspective that we are engaged in mutual learning and collaborative professional development with our colleagues at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. In the six months preceding our visit, our colleagues at NMMU share with us some of the teaching and learning issues and student affairs issues that they are working on. The MSU teams prepare for conversations and workshops whose design will contribute ideas to colleagues here while also enabling our MSU team members to learn more, in the process, about higher education in South Africa, about particular teaching and learning and student affairs issues, and about engaging in professional interchange with colleagues in a context that has both similarities with and differences from our university.
Once “on the ground” in South Africa, we interact in meetings, workshops, and conversations with many colleagues in academic staff, student affairs, and administrative positions, as well as with students at the university.  Part of the experience is sharing what we have prepared while also making adjustments as we work in response to learning more about the specific context at the university here. We have to engage in constant learning about the challenges, developments, and issues of higher education in South Africa, while also facilitating workshops in which we are asked to offer ideas and approaches concerning teaching and learning or student affairs topics.
The time here is quite intense but also quite rewarding. Key values that we bring are commitment to mutual learning, collegiality, and respect for our colleagues here in South Africa. We work hard, we do our best to make substantive contributions, and we learn a lot. We also experience South Africa in a variety of ways through experiences that help us understand more fully the context in which higher education here is situated. We’ll keep you posted on some of ideas and insights that we gain.