Articles

Dr. Kathleen Matheos from the University of Manitoba is an AWB volunteer on a project provide mentorship for the establishment of a Centre for Learning Excellence with Fatima Jinnah Women University in Pakistan. Given the current international travel limitations, this project is being implemented virtually.

This is AWB’s first project in Pakistan where pre-pandemic travel advisories had made on-site visits impossible. Ironically, the pandemic’s restrictions alerted us to the potential of working online in such locations.

In January 2021, the Academic Administrative Workshop was held online. Fifty-two departmental leaders and faculty members participated.

The workshop covered a range of topics related to the establishment of a new academic support centre aimed at enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. The workshop was recorded and, along with reference materials, will serve as an ongoing resource.

The ten days of professional development also included three international keynote speakers who delivered sessions on academic values, women in academic leadership, and quality in higher education in uncertainty.

“This was the first workshop of its nature with a unique focus to generate a vigorous exchange of innovative ideas, experiences, and insights among the departmental leaders. This workshop was designed with an aim to mobilize their inner resources, inculcate a passion for continuous learning while strengthening their commitment for their role as department leader and towards the institution.

 

The participation of the emerging leaders was the most aspiring part of this workshop, which I believe will boost the overall quality of educational attainment in Fatima Jinnah Women University in the long run. This collaborative exchange both with the expert resource persons as well as among the participants may stimulate the departmental leadership to make substantial reforms in their individual departments in particular and university in general.”

– Dr. Salma Nazar Khan, Project Coordinator
Fatima Jinnah Women University

The next phase of the project will focus on crafting the policies and procedures surrounding the development of the newly established Centre for Professional Practice at Fatima Jinnah Women University.

This fascinating and timely article was published in June, written by AWB volunteer and University of Manitoba professor, Dr. Jason Kindrachuk. The article references the three weeks he spent on an AWB project at the University of Nairobi Institute for Tropical Infectious Diseases in Kenya. Read the article in Forbes here.

AWB’s vision is that higher education is essential to building a more prosperous, healthy, and stable world. Such a world cannot exist unless it is free of racism and injustice of all kinds. Therefore, at this time, we reiterate our unwavering commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental values at the heart of our work and indispensable elements of the type of higher education in which we believe.

“In a remote area of Nepal, an eight-year-old boy is carried into a tiny hospital by his grandparents. The boy has fallen from a height and sustained a complex fracture in his elbow. Treating the injury will require resetting and stabilizing bones, but this involves a specialized surgery and medical hardware not available to the only doctor in the area, whose hospital is hours away from the nearest city or specialist. Worse yet, the boy’s circulation has been impeded by the fracture, and without treatment, he will lose the use of his hand and forearm.

The doctor does what he can to set the bones and stabilize them, which he does by sedating the boy himself (there are no anesthesiologists where he works), setting the bones, and stabilizing the fracture with metal wiring, all while taking direction from an open textbook.

Incredibly, the surgery is a success. The boy will make a full recovery.

A week after the operation, Professor Karl Stobbe at McMaster University looks over post-operation x-rays from the case. Glancing over his shoulder, his colleague, an orthopedic surgeon, remarks, “That’s honestly as good a job as I could’ve done.”

It’s an incredible feat of medical resilience and resourcefulness that Stobbe says he has witnessed many times. For the past three years, Stobbe has been working with Nepal’s Patan Academy of Health Sciences to build the country’s capacity to train doctors for practice in rural areas, an effort that will have an enormous impact on the wellbeing of those living in these areas.”

Read more of this article about the work of AWB in Academica’s Today’s Top Ten in Higher Ed on March 27, 2019.