Blog

A Celebration of Respect, Trust, and Vision

As the first cohort of the BU Wheelock-Bahrain Teachers College partnership prepares to graduate, a faculty member reflects

Among the BU Wheelock graduates celebrating their program completion this May will be 24 students from the Middle East nation of Bahrain. This pioneering group of students from Bahrain Teachers College will complete BU Wheelock’s EdM in Educational Leadership & Policy Studies (ELPS) program. Several of the soon-to-be graduates will travel to Boston to celebrate in person, while others will celebrate virtually in Bahrain.

In January, I visited BTC with a team of BU Wheelock faculty, including Pipier Smith-Mumford, Stacy Scott, and Ramon Gonzalez. The jam-packed week included meetings with key governmental and university officials, such as the minister of education and the president of the University of Bahrain, Bahrain Quality Assurance, and the Higher Education Council. We visited Bahraini public and private schools, including the Alia Center for Autism, Noor Al Diyar School, Shaikha Moza Government School, and the Naseer Vocational Training Center. We also met with BTC faculty to discuss issues in educational leadership, teacher training, and professional development.

A delightful dinner with BU alumna Shaika Aseel Khalifa brought the BU and BTC collaborators even closer together with warmth and fellowship. We were inspired to hear from current and prospective students, including Hamad Alhassouni, Jawaher AlKhalifa, Balques Abdulla, and Fatema Ali, who described how the program benefitted them and prepared them for future leadership.

To help build our understanding of cultural and societal issues, several of us enjoyed visits to sites such as the Constitution Monument, the Bahrain National Museum, and the Bahrain Fort Museum. We learned that that “openness, resourcefulness, mutual respect, trust, and vision” is one of the themes of Bahrain’s future planning. Organized by our wonderful hosts, BTC faculty member Dr. Masooma Ali Husain Almutawah and Dean Lucy Bailey, the cultural visits helped us understand the highly diverse student body in Bahrain, where nearly 50% of the 1.5 million population is composed of expatriates, including many from India.

With the BU Wheelock-BTC partnership now in its second year, we are pleased to have two cohorts of students participating in online courses taught by ELPS faculty members Pipier Smith-Mumford, Stacy Scott, Ramon Gonzalez, Jeff Young, Olivia Chi, and Ariel Tichnor-Wagner. The team has flexibly and adeptly adjusted to time-zone and other logistics between Boston and Bahrain. Course topics, which were developed in consultation with BTC faculty, have included performance-based educational leadership, organizational analysis, strategic planning, and international education policy.

Dr. Smith-Mumford, who taught the first cohort in both their first and final semesters, remarked, “It’s so wonderful to see the growth in some of these students over the course of the program! To be with them at the beginning and now see how far they have come has been a real highlight for me.” Dr. Scott reflected on this year’s second visit to Bahrain as having “brought us to a deeper level of understanding about the kinds of societal issues that Bahrain is working to address through education.”

Officials at the Bahrain Quality Assurance (BQA), an educational regulatory body, agree. The BQA’s chief executive Dr. Mariam Hasan Mustafa shared with us the multi-year vision for educational quality oversight in Bahrain. She noted that four of our students had won the Public Vote for an innovation project developed in Dr. Smith-Mumford’s course at the government-sponsored Fikra competition last year, illustrating a kind of creative thought that will be valuable as a next generation of leaders addresses today’s challenges. Their project, a 360 teacher evaluation system, signals the potential lasting impact of the BU Wheelock graduates on their schools and the educational systems.

It’s been a joy to work with the ELPS team to bring this project forward and serve as the administrative lead—we’ve learned so much from our BTC partners and students and look forward to further collaborations to come. We hope to launch a second master’s program (Curriculum & Teaching) in the coming year and look forward to bringing a new team of faculty to Bahrain next year!