5 October 2024 - World Teachers' Day
In honor of the World Teachers' Day 2024, the UNESCO Chair team would like to share a story about teachers who have contributed to its research work.
“Teachers are heroes!”
These are the words of Jenna Thomas, a 23-year-old foundation phase education student at Nelson Mandela University from Gqeberha, formerly Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Held annually on 5 October since 1994, World Teachers’ Day commemorates the anniversary of the adoption of the 1966 UNESCO Recommendation concerning the status of teachers. The theme of World Teachers’ Day 2024 is “Valuing teacher voices: towards a new social contract for education”.
Across the world, in various high- and low-income countries, the value of the teaching profession is generally perceived to be low and even declining. Yet, despite the centrality of the central role of teachers and the potential of their involvement in improving education, few countries engage in genuine teacher consultation and social dialog processes with social partners in any significant way. The recently published Global Report on Teachers (2024) by UNESCO and the International Teacher Task Force sounds the alarm about the global shortage of teachers and the massive increase in teacher turnover rates.
Teachers conduct research, adapt pedagogy, prioritize curriculum content, assess progress and contextualize, personalize education in the classroom, and engage in decision-making in their classrooms. For example, in South Africa, Gqeberha singer and songwriter Mariloe Booysen said teachers knowingly or unknowingly carry the responsibility of investing into lives of the future of our country, the world we live in: “And I truly thank each and every single teacher that ploughs into these minds that later go on and do great things!”
According to South African teachers’ union employee Venita van Wyk, teachers just do their job, and sometimes they don’t even know that they inspire: “They are the heroes that sometimes don’t get the necessary accolades. I had many teachers at high school, and although it appeared that I was only a traveller passing through, I was so important to them that after all these years they still remember me.”
As teachers fulfill an important community function and on the occasion of the current World Teachers' Day 2024, the UNESCO Chair research group would like to thank teachers as a “tribute” for their not easy - and complex - work situation and for the inspiration and cooperation that the research group experiences.