Faculty Development Design: A Curricular Training Model for Academic Professional Development

The need to support the quality of academic teaching is clearly recognised at international level. In particular, assessing and promoting the pedagogic competences of the university teachers appears a priority task, albeit complex, aimed to improve teaching and to increase learning outcomes. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, which suddenly forced teachers to introduce hybrid models and practices in their teaching, accelerated the process of raising awareness about the need for high quality professional development and for an advancement in the field of Digital Scholarship. The University of Bari has started, on the basis of the needs analysis emerging from the PRODID research project, the structuring of pilot training paths for the professional development of university teachers in UNIBA Teaching Learning Laboratory (TLL). The curricular model is based on adult learning and methodologies for professional learning, in particular the so-called ‘artefacts’. The training model for the university teacher requires a research posture of co-construction and ample space dedicated to the epistemological dialectic between disciplinary teacher and didactic.