Mohammed Ibahrine, Assistant Professor at AL AKHAWAYN UNIVERSITY in Ifrane, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
m.ibahrine@aui.ma
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TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Milestones

2007| 2006| 2005 | 2004 | 1996 | 1995 |


I view teaching as an indispensable component of a successful faculty profile. As a teacher, it is my goal to make students feel inspired by their participation in a course I am teaching.

My ideal is to emphasize real-world and empirical applications of the theories, concepts and issues we study. This is most likely to occur when students become personally engaged with the material and perceive the subject matter to be directly relevant to their own lives.

My pedagogical goal is to encourage students to learn the fact-oriented information and complex analytical skills to think critically and solve problems.

What I am doing with my students is to motivate them by means of applying the Open Source concept on teaching. That is to say my lectures are open source lectures. Students are motivated by being encouraged in the process of Co-creation of the code of the lecture.

What counts is not the product but the process.

In next spring, I am considering using the social software: blogs, wikis, and podcasting to start Education 2.0.

My class time consists of a mix of lectures, small-group discussion, large-group discussion, films and guest speakers.

In first sessions, students fill out basic information for me regarding their own background and reasons for taking the course.

The process by which I work to stimulate student’s engagement is to give a brief overview of the theoretical positions and the research methods and then start a discussion.

My lectures are short and made as interactive as possible:
I have created PowerPoint versions of all of my lectures. They include colour photos, relevant statistics and related visual images to help retain visual interest and to better illustrate material. They are also accompanied by a written outline for students to follow and questions for stimulating class discussion.

While students must ultimately take responsibility for their own learning, I often try to inspire their desire to learn even outside the classroom:
A wide range of learning activities including reading, writing assignments, internet searches can be mentioned.

I strive to optimize students’ engagement and success by cultivating learning partnerships and build trust among them.
I actively encourage dialogue with students on an individual level, during office hours or via email.

Providing access to my expertise is also a priority in my teaching.

One important standard that I have set myself is giving students a clear indication on how they will be graded.

Setting clear standards helps limit grading bias.

Presentations in class are also graded in terms of form, substance and pedagogical value; students are actively involved in the assessment of these presentations for they can learn a lot from others’ errors (critical thinking).

The final area of my teaching philosophy I would like to mention is the strong will to constant improvement of my personal teaching. As a teacher, I constantly evaluate my performance in the classroom. This includes assessing how I presented the material, what students’ reactions to the material were, and how to maintain students’ interest. Additionally, I regularly talk with peers and experiment with new methods.

Through these evaluative processes I am continually refining my teaching practices and growing as a teacher.

I am now thinking about how I will implement effectively blogs and wikis in my next courses.

Furthermore, I am planning to attend a course on information management.

Finally, I firmly believe that any good teacher remains a good student throughout life, which means that there is no rigid dividing line between research and teaching. Good teachers need to be at the cutting edge of recent scholarship.


2008

COMMUNICATION COURSES_FALL 2008