Professor Bahaudin Mujtaba with his students
If there is one thing that Professor Bahaudin Mujtaba, D.B.A., has learned during his years in higher education is the complexity of teaching a diverse group of students.
“We often go into the classroom with the assumption that all students have the same capabilities and credentials to be in the classroom,” he said. “However, the reality is that there is always some degree of variance among learners and some students learn differently even though they have the same credentials as others sitting next to them.”
Bahaudin Mujtaba, D.B.A.
Mujtaba came to Nova Southeastern University in 1998 as an adjunct faculty member and joined full-time as director of undergraduate business programs and an assistant professor in 2002. He then served as a director of Institutional Relations and Accreditation at the H. Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship for two years, then as Management Department chair for six years.
Mujtaba was born in Khoshie, a small district in eastern Afghanistan, and was raised in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was one of six children in a family that fled his home country during the early 1980s during the Russian invasion. His father worked as a civil engineering professor at Kabul University, while his mother took care of Mujtaba and his siblings. The family eventually settled in Florida.
“My father has been working as a civil engineer in Florida since 1983,” Mujtaba said.
As a teenager, Mujtaba says he had no plans of following in the academic footsteps of his father.
“When my father was a university professor, I used to see him grade papers and prepare lesson plans all hours of the night,” he said. “As such, I did not want to be a university professor when I was a teenager.”
But when Mujtaba received his doctorate degree from NSU in Business Administration in 1996, professors asked him to lecture on business ethics to doctoral students for four hours a week. The experience changed his perspective on teaching.
“Since I was a management development specialist and I facilitated three to five days leadership and management workshops for corporate managers, teaching business ethics to doctoral students was interesting and enjoyable,” he said. “Then the university asked me if I could teach a master’s course for the entire semester; so, I did, and it was fun. I wanted to continue doing it.
“After three years of adjunct teaching during evenings, online and weekends, I retired after 16 years of working in corporate America and transitioned into academia on a full-time basis. It has been a fun ride ever since.”
Mujtaba says his relationship with his students is a partnership and joint learning process where he lectures, facilitates, and encourages collaboration regarding various management and leadership topics in the modern workplace.
“My expertise is in business ethics, training, diversity, cross-cultural management, and leadership development,” he said.
When asked about his attraction to NSU, Mujtaba emphasizes the “flexibility” of the NSU working culture. Here, he says, he can teach in various modalities and travel worldwide to learn, speak, and conduct research.
“I have had the pleasure of traveling, presenting, and/or lecturing at many different continents and countries such as China, Jamaica, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Afghanistan and many others,” he said, adding that he also served as a cultural consultant on the 2007 Oscar-nominated movie “The Kite Runner.”
Mujtaba’s research focuses on creating awareness regarding ethical and moral management practices. The power of good research resides in the ability to find factual answers to dilemmas based on evidence and critical thinking, he says.
“I have written extensively about effective leadership, coaching, equity, inclusion, diversity, avoidance of discrimination, and the creation of a healthy work environment for all workers in an organization and society,” Mujtaba said.
When it comes to teaching, Mujtaba emphasizes possessing the capacity to develop others and help students achieve their goals and learn at the same time. He notes that achieving such a goal is a balancing act with its fair share of challenges that necessitate understanding the academic dynamics of individual students.
“One challenging element of teaching has been adapting to the diverse learning styles of sometimes 20 different students in the same classroom and seeing that all of them can achieve the same outcomes using a different pace, separate exercises, and/or person-based accommodations,” he said. “When diverse students with different learning styles can all achieve excellent outcomes in the classroom at the end of a semester, that is what I consider success.
“When I see students graduate and make positive contributions to society, well, then that is just additional healthy icing on the Publix Bakery cake,” he added.
Posted 12/12/22
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