Since 2012, hospitality management professor Hubert “Bert” Van Hoof has spent a considerable amount time in South America mentoring university faculty who often have limited resources and little advanced education. Van Hoof has helped his colleagues to conceptualize and design studies, collect data, analyze findings, and write academic articles for peer-reviewed journals.
What started out as a one-year sabbatical as a Prometeo Scholar at the University of Cuenca-Ecuador, where Van Hoof was tasked with developing faculty members’ research skills and starting university initiatives, soon led to outreach efforts at several other universities in Ecuador and Argentina. Along the way, Van Hoof’s own graduate students at Penn State have become part of the process, gaining first-hand experiences with research and publishing in cross-cultural environments.
Under the guidance of Van Hoof, faculty members and graduate students at Ecuadorian and Argentinian universities and Penn State worked together, developing and honing skills, and ultimately publishing peer-reviewed articles in publications such as the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and The European Journal of Tourism, Hospitality and Recreation.
“For me, my role and responsibility as a full professor, especially toward the end of my career, is not to publish my own articles as a single author anymore; a full professor’s role is to guide others and take on a mentoring role,” Van Hoof said. “When you see the limited means available in other places as compared to what we have here at Penn State, this is something we as Penn Staters, and as the fortunate ones, should do more of.”
Historically, universities in Ecuador were teaching institutions. However, several years ago, those universities faced challenges when a new national law required research to be a major activity for higher education institutions, according to Mateo Estrella, professor and former dean of College of Tourism and Hospitality Management at the University of Cuenca.
This new landscape motivated Estrella to start a program to raise his faculty’s awareness about research and enhance their research skills.
Estrella came to Penn State in 2010 as a Humphrey Scholar and worked with Van Hoof on several projects. Afterward, he invited Van Hoof to the University of Cuenca as a Prometeo Scholar to develop research initiatives and train faculty members to become researchers. The Prometeo program is sponsored by Ecuador’s national government and brings foreign scholars to Ecuador to mentor university faculty in developing their research skills.
“The intention was to increase our research program and start small research projects from scratch, accompanying faculty members step-by-step through the research process, ending in papers published in national and international journals,” Estrella said. “This was a very important initiative and the results were very relevant for the faculty.”
Four years later, Van Hoof still serves as an adviser at the school and visits Ecuador twice a year.