Dr. Gordon MacLeod: Dedicated to Quality Teacher Education

Dr. Gordon MacLeod was appointed Director of Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED) in August 2001. He had previously served there as Acting Director and had joined the Institute in 1999 as a professor. Dr. MacLeod has extensive experience as a teacher, teacher educator and researcher, holding faculty and management positions in educational institutions in Australia and the UK. With a PhD in education and psychology from the University of Stirling, UK, he also has a substantial number of research publications to his credit.

What inspired you to choose a profession of teaching teachers?

As an adolescent in the 1960s, like many of my contemporaries, I believed that the world could ''be put to rights.''  One of the crucially important ways of achieving this was via education - humanizing education; radical education; respectful education. I was also very fortunate to complete my graduate studies in education under the guidance of an intellectual mentor whose commitment to quality in educational enquiry and an associated honesty in intellectual life was inspirational. It was from him that I learnt the force of a simple truth - the quality of our schools cannot be better than the quality of teachers in them.

What attracted you to Pakistan and AKU-IED?

Initially, it was through personal contact with the Director of AKU-IED at that time. My visits to Karachi and the Northern Areas of Pakistan were also most encouraging. But it has really been being here and the immensity of the intrinsic rewards of working with the staff and students of AKU-IED which has led to my commitment. My wife and I have met tremendous friendliness and friendship here.

What are some of the challenges the Institute is faced with and how does it address these?

This answer requires a book or two! We face several challenges including coping with unmet demand for our services and programmes; overcoming distance, as we expand both in Pakistan and elsewhere; and ensuring impact and impact amplification as we contemplate how this small, private university can best address large and enduring public educational problems in our natural constituencies.

These challenges interact with each other and it becomes very clear that doing 'more of the same' is neither realistic nor cost-effective. Instead, we must continue with initiatives such as internationalisation (and the need to respond to this by decentralising); the creation of Professional Development Centres, providing continuing professional education for in-service teachers; the continuing growth of open learning; and the ongoing development of impact-multiplying and amplifying approaches such as our creative work with our graduates as professional development teachers and the exciting policy dialogues we have recently undertaken throughout Pakistan. Above all, we need to maintain and indeed strengthen the very impressive approach to individual capacity development that AKU-IED has been pursuing. This includes the introduction of our own PhD programme in 2004. Just as schools need high quality teachers, so too do universities need high quality faculty. Our faculty is already good; we need to enable them to become better.

How has AKU-IED made a difference to the lives of teachers and others through its programmes and outreach activities both nationally and internationally?

I am glad that the question includes our international efforts. I think we sometimes forget that AKU-IED has been developing individual capacity for countries outside Pakistan since January 1994, and that we ran our first Certificate course outside the country in 1998. Recent impact studies carried out at  AKU-IED demonstrated that our courses and programmes are making a difference. At the professional level, our graduates become promotable and/or are promoted. At another level, they develop and apply new skill-sets as well as enhancing their social skills, including listening skills, sharing and respect. They also develop new classroom skills including those of classroom management; become reflective practitioners or educational leaders rather than technocratic supervisors; engage in cooperative learning and develop active environments for the pursuit of learning and teaching with the assistance of their communities, both in school and outside school. Above all, we hope that they learn to assert and re-assert their humanity.

What role does information technology play in the development and delivery of teaching and learning programmes in Pakistan?

I think we do the same things with information technology as do other sections of the University. We provide individual email access to students, faculty, researchers, and teaching staff, and, for example, almost all programmatic and academic announcements are now sent to the students via email. We have two multimedia-enabled computer laboratories for student use and these are complemented by four library terminals for public Internet access. We make some use of web-based technologies in our open learning courses not only in Pakistan but also for our current students enrolled at a distance from Central Asia and East Africa as well as Pakistan. Our library offers access to a large number of online journals and provides a small audio-visual facility. All our faculty, research and teaching staff have individual access to a computer. For example, average Internet use for faculty is some 17 hours per month. We already see the Net as an invaluable information resource but its use will only fully emerge when we can obtain fast, reliable broadband Internet connections.

For more information on IED, please visit: http://www.aku.edu/ied/