John Pierce had never been to central Asia, so preparing for a trip to the mountainous, landlocked Republic of Tajikistan last spring wasn’t like going from Nebraska to Iowa.
Pierce, chair of Southeast Community College’s Electronic Systems Technology and Energy Generation Operations programs, traveled to Tajikistan to train educators there in the DACUM/SCID curriculum development process. DACUM, which stands for Developing A Curriculum, is a methodology that uses organized techniques to capture specific knowledge and skills from experts currently working in various occupations. SCID stands for Systematic Curriculum and Instructional Development. Pierce is a DACUM facilitator/trainer for SCC.
Photo cutline: John Pierce, back row, fourth from right, poses for a photo with a group of new DACUM facilitators he trained, along with the “zoo technologists” panel in which the new DACUM facilitators extracted expertise. Pierce spent three days with this group.
Pierce worked as a consultant for The Ohio State University during the one-week training session.
“Although this was not an SCC-sponsored event, my credentials in the DACUM curriculum quality-assurance process, which SCC uses extensively, is what brought about the offer for me to conduct this important nation-developing training,” Pierce said.
Pierce helped a German aid agency develop curriculum for its vocational education system in Tajikistan by training local Tajik DACUM facilitators. Three other DACUM trainers were there from Germany and Moldova.
“This was a very educational experience for me,” he said. “I have new ideas on how to improve our own DACUM efforts and have shared some DACUM charts we produced in Russian. They were translated to English so we can see the differences in approaches and language barriers.”
Last January, Bob Norton from OSU’s DACUM world headquarters called Pierce and asked him to consider helping with a project in the former Soviet Republic of Tajikistan. He accepted.
The project centered around the German aid agency GIZ, which attempted to assist the Tajik government with economic development by establishing vocational education with a system of national standards for a wide variety of occupations. Pierce said some vocational education existed in Tajikistan prior to the project, “but it was very sporadic with no standards to guide them in developing curriculum.”
GIZ used the process to establish training standards in Tajikistan.
Pierce helped train 16 educators in the DACUM system, including GIZ employees, members of the Tajik Ministry of Education and Ministry of Labor, and instructors in the Vocational Training Center where the training was held.
Pierce spent the week teaching the DACUM methodology and assisting in performing a full two-day DACUM workshop.
“The workshop was with a panel of expert workers as the trainees’ first practical application of the DACUM process,” Pierce said. “Since we were training 16 new facilitators, we conducted four DACUM workshops that week with four new facilitators and one trainer in each room.
Occupations studied were construction workers, carpenters, sewers (tailors), and cattle breeders (zoo technologists), which was Pierce’s group. A final day was spent debriefing the new facilitators, recapping the week’s training, suggesting the next steps in their training, and awarding them with certificates of completion.
Pierce’s role during the two-day workshop was to observe the new facilitators and offer constructive criticism.
GIZ is funded by the German federal government as a non-profit agency whose mission is to provide economic development and educational assistance to impoverished populations around the world. The agency contracted with OSU to utilize the DACUM methodology in establishing educational standards and curriculum development assistance for the Tajik educators. OSU in turn hired four certified DACUM facilitator trainers to go to Tajikistan. Two of the trainers were from Moldova, in Eastern Europe, and one was from Germany. Pierce was the only American on the project.
“All of us had been trained and certified by Bob Norton at OSU,” Pierce said. “There are only a handful of certified DACUM facilitator trainers in the world.”
Pierce said it was the first time the four certified trainers had met or worked together.
“Fortunately, all three of the other trainers spoke fluent English, Russian and their own native languages,” Pierce said. “I was the one with the greatest language barrier as I only spoke English and a tiny bit of Russian that I learned in preparation for this project.”
Pierce said SCC is one of only a few colleges in the world that has taken quality assurance to this level of verification.
“SCC is committed to quality by using the DACUM methodology,” he said. “This trip highlighted our leadership in quality assurance in postsecondary education nationally and internationally.
“This was a very rich experience in a very poor part of the world. I met lots of very nice, interesting people and feel like I contributed a little bit to helping Tajikistan improve their lot in life with some educational assistance.”
For more information on the Electronic Systems Technology and Energy Generation Operations programs, readers can visit the following links: Electronic Systems Technology; Energy Generation Operations