Faculty Development Centri di Professionalità Accademica (CPA)

The university world has undergone a wave of changes that can be traced back to the pursuit of excellence, declined according to the two dimensions of assessment and reporting. Three are the most obvious: the first, the transition from a curiosity driven research to a functional research to achieve results that can be assessed in a short time; from pure to applied research, from a problem-making approach to a problem-solving one, from knowledge as a process to knowledge as a product, from a disinterested model to the utilitarian one (Barnett, 1994); the second, concerning the courses: since the way of conceiving learning has changed; the curricula tend to be defined in terms of prespecified learning outcomes (Blackmore, 2016); the third, peculiar to the administrative structure: new superstructures (planning, evaluation, controls, communication) became essential and the staff grew massively. These changes have to deal with the loss of prestige of academic life, the change in the role of the student, which has become prominent, the increase in bureaucratic procedures. In order to allow university structures to face cultural challenges since the 1970s, North American universities have organized initiatives aimed at developing and promoting better courses. These initiatives are defined with the expression Faculty Development (FD), an academic policy aimed at creating the conditions for improving the skills of all those involved in the activities carried out in a university. In the Italian situation there is a lack of a true teaching training policy for researchers and university professors, not to mention the need to overcome the prejudice according to which it is not necessary to learn to teach, but it is sufficient to have success in research. Furthermore, in the last decade a continuous and intense request of organizational, evaluative and documentary actions has been absorbing time and energy to academic staff, without the support of adequate management systems and without assessment surveys able to measure the effective outcome of all these actions. The final effect is the decline (Capano et al., 2017) of the university institution. The culture of the Faculty Development can contribute to the Italian context providing actions to support change, providing the academic staff with the necessary tools to perform a good scholarship, effective courses and chances of increasing the cultural life of the community. The present study offers a systematic analysis of the literature on the topic. In the Italian context there is no particular attention to university-learning contexts. Courses are conceived as curricular packages and the preparation of the learning conditions for the achievement of the degree result just in a series of lectures, frontal or workshops. Given this situation, the need to improve the quality of teaching has never been as urgent and challenging as it is today, in a climate of continuous change. New trends define higher education, crossing institutional and national borders. They influence the way in which effective teaching is conceptualized, conducted and supported, assessed, valued and recognized. It is necessary to address issues such as inadequate preparation for academic work in graduated studies, faculty member's inability to transfer skills, increasing complexity of academic environments, expectations and institutional responsibilities, the need to better prepare students with particular needs, the need to keep up with the leaps of knowledge and changes in the professions. It is also essential to improve the quality of teaching because it reduces the number of dropouts. Based on the phenomenal survey, the following research questions have emerged: what is FD? What can you do with it? How do you put it into practice? What are the potentials? What are the limits? The FD has the task of encouraging faculty members to take an interest in teaching and learning processes and to provide a safe and positive environment dedicated to research, experiment, evaluate and adopt new methods (Lancaster et al., 2014). It is aimed at promoting change both at the individual level and at the organizational level. Improvement in teaching skills is central (Steinert, 2014). Two important objectives are represented by the promotion of leadership development and management development (Steiner et al., 2012). Once the teaching methodologies have been defined, which can be object of learning by the faculty members, it has become necessary to identify the main training modalities that a Faculty Development Center (FDc) should put in place to favor the learning of the teaching skills. To understand its real function, it was useful to examine the activities proposed by the most important centers in North America, analyzing their structure, the resources available and identifying the two main figures: the educational developer and the director. The analysis has allowed to highlight the multiple services that can be provided by a FDc. Results were very useful, as they offered pragmatic indications for the purposes of thinking an Italian innovative academic policy, based on the establishment of brand new “Centri di Professionalità Accademica”.