By: Krisela Karaja
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should be treated as the highly trained, skilled people that they are.
However, all universities—in the US, in Albania, and elsewhere—
are institutions that encourage thinking and reflection. Therefore,
enacting university-wide self-evaluations, enacting universitymandated, quantifiable goal-setting in each department, hosting
mandatory university-wide professional development workshops
for all faculty (young and old; inexperienced and experienced), and
providing faculty with the resources necessary for cutting-edge
research (e.g. access to online research databases and access
to modern research-database specialists for inquiries), is crucial.
Albania’s educators are bright, talented, and most of those that I
have encountered are dedicated to their respective fields, their jobs,
and most importantly their students. However, these educators are
themselves life-long students of pedagogy and they too need to
be given access to proper resources for professional development
at every stage in their educational career; they too need to be
nurtured so that even the most traditional professor can provide a
modern, quality education to students, and so that even the most
nervous and inexperienced of professors can feel secure at the
head of the classroom.
I am humbled by the strides that Albanian education has made in
recent years. Most students I have met are hungry for knowledge—
excited to learn about the world around them—and most professors
are eager to help students cultivate the skills needed to seek this
knowledge. What I have noticed is simply a disconnect in terms
of logistics and organization, which can of course be addressed
with time, with university-wide technological investment, and
with transparency in centralization. Furthermore, the assumption
of “professor as authority figure,” which is currently still being
dismantled, also causes a disconnect, where students may fear
experimenting, making mistakes, or respectfully challenging the
authority figure. This too can be addressed through investment in
university-wide professional support groups and workshops for all
professors headed by qualified,