Shifting our Focus in Professional Development Programs from Changing Individuals to Building Community: Lessons from Namibia

Abstract

This study investigated what academics in Namibia view as barriers to publishing and what supports they believe would facilitate their work. Data for exploring these issues were collected in reflection papers written by university teachers during a semester-long workshop. Their comments fell into two categories, one of which focused on individual weaknesses and individualistic solutions. The other category of comments made us aware of a factor to which we had not given sufficient consideration: the necessity of building community among scholars as a way of making research more productive and creative. We consider these findings within Bourdieu's (1989) framework noting the symbolic power of discourse on academic writing and the way in which challenges to that framework include not only “learning the unwritten rules” but creating social networks of support to allow and sustain that learning and to challenge the practices that isolate scholars as individual competitors. We argue that Ubuntu (human interconnectedness) is an essential factor in academic life, and it is a critical for challenging the power relations of dominant discourse.