Authors: JC Couture, Sam Sellar and Roar Grøttvik*.

This article is based on a background paper prepared for the Futures of Education Initiative.

Teachers can and should be at the centre of discussions about the futures of education and shaping educational responses to environmental threats, technological disruption and the ongoing pandemic. The pandemic has reminded us that we cannot expect the future to be a linear extension of the present. It has also left educators, parents and students grappling for alternatives to the corporate vision of digitalised and personalised learning, which fails to advance a wholistic vision of education.

The education futures currently promoted by some international organisations, in conjunction with corporate and philanthropic actors, offers up visions of a post-pandemic landscape “revolutionized” by innovative technologies and the reconceptualization of schooling. These visions also represent the teaching profession as anachronistic and an obstacle to change. While the disruption triggered by the pandemic provides a catalyst for fundamental change, we need to move beyond questions of technological disruption to broaden conversations about educational futures, and to include not only teachers but also students, families and communities. The critical question is how to democratize the way we imagine and prepare for the future (Urry, 2016: 2-13).

Teachers re-shaping the conversations around their future

In our recent background paper for the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, we ask whether new forms of collaboration between teacher organisations and academic researchers can help the teaching profession to shape the futures of education. We argue that futures studies need the teaching profession and teacher organizations need futures thinking.

Teacher organizations have to balance short-term tactics with long-term strategy. On the one hand, teachers are often directly or indirectly dealing with ‘big picture’ questions about how education can address societal and environmental problems. At the same time, these organizations have to find pragmatic solutions in an effort to improve the increasingly difficult working conditions that teachers face globally.

Teacher organisations need to sustain their tactical work of resistance and cooperation in response to the immediate horizon of what Sohail Inayatullah (2013) calls predicted futures. At the same time, these organisations must also develop critical and participatory futures thinking that produces new possibilities for renewal and professional leadership by supporting members to envision alternative futures (Inayatullah, 2013).

Teacher organizations can move towards “futures-making” research while continuing to protect members’ interests by drawing on support from “critical friends” in academia. Teachers already produce and shape knowledge in their professional lives, but both teacher organizations and academics can benefit from collaborations that focus on the futures of the profession. There are many successful examples of academics working with teacher organizations to produce research-driven visions of educational change.

Unions, academics and policymakers working together: the Norway-Canada Partnership

The Union of Education Norway (UEN) is one example of a teacher organisation that has become a co-creator of alternative futures of education. This involved developing a more strategic approach to research: a long-term commitment to rethinking and repositioning UEN’s capacity for knowledge production through publication of its research strategy paper and working with new partners.

Two of the prioritized areas of the UEN research strategy were Democracy and formation (Bildung) and Subjects, subject areas and learning processes. Based on these aims, and following a year-long set of negotiations, the Norway-Canada Partnership (NORCAN) project was launched in Banff, Alberta, in 2015. NORCAN was a joint research effort by the Alberta Teachers’ Association, the Ontario Teachers’ Federation and the UEN, with the Ministry of Education in Ontario. NORCAN brought together a network of nine schools and created opportunities for teachers, school leaders, students and academics to collaboratively undertake “futures-making” research “by rethinking the meaning of success in mathematics in our schools” (Stiles, 2019).

Concerns about mathematics performance in Norway and Canada had spurred the growth of a culture of accountability and testing. In this context, the senior union leaders participating in NORCAN felt they had to protect the professional autonomy of teachers. This involved countering the idea that the teachers themselves were unable to innovate and lead educational change. As NORCAN’s work unfolded, a concern for pragmatic educational development quickly shifted to critical and participatory futures thinking.

Towards new partnerships to define the futures of teaching

The global pandemic has amplified forces that could potentially weaken public education. The teaching profession must continue to ensure that its voice is heard in any reform process, while joining with the communities it serves to democratize education futures. We need new alliances such as the Education Futures Partnership, which is driven by the question of what kind of educational futures we want, and why.

Collaborative, participatory futures-making should be prioritized as both teacher organizations and the academic community respond to ongoing disruptions. We must work together to ensure that future visions of education remain strongly grounded in the idea of education as a public good. In partnership we can meet the challenge issued by Hannah Arendt, when she proclaimed that “education is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world” (1993: 180).

References

Arendt, H. (1993), Between Past and Future, New York, Penguin Books.

Inayatullah, S. (2013), Futures Studies: Theories and Methods, pp. 36-66.

Stiles, P.J. (2019), Disrupting School Leadership-A Leadership of Disruption, PhD Dissertation,     University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. 

Urry, J. (2016), What is the Future? Cambridge, Polity Press.

The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this article do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO and the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors; they are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.

Credit: Photo credit: Taichung ANL/Flickr.com

*Dr J-C Couture is currently adjunct instructor with the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Dr Sam Sellar is Reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and lead editor of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Roar Grøttvik is a political adviser with the Union of Education Norway and Chair of the Education International Research Institute Board.

Authors: James O'Meara from ICET and Purna Shresta from VSO.

The Global Education Summit in July raised a record US$4 billion, which will help 175 million children learn. This stunning effort shows what is possible when governments work with the UN and other intergovernmental organizations, alongside development agencies and organizations from civil society and the private sector. Such cooperation will help us achieve the common objective envisaged in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Education that includes everyone and gives everyone a fair chance of learning is not possible without ensuring that everyone has access to quality teachers. It is crucial to implement policies and practices that promote inclusion and equity for teachers in every educational context, considering gender, socio-economic status, location, ability, and other factors that can lead to exclusion.

Ensuring that everyone has access to quality teachers requires significant levels of investment, especially in least developed countries and small island developing states. To ensure quality education for all by 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa – the region with the highest concentration of least developed countries – will need to recruit and prepare 15 million teachers.

Providing access to quality teachers for all requires:

• closing the gaps in teacher numbers, qualifications, gender, and connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa. The proportion of qualified teachers in the region has steadily declined since 2000 at both primary and secondary levels. Female teachers play a pivotal role in encouraging girls’ enrolment, but less than 50% of primary teachers and 30% of secondary teachers are female. Lack of infrastructure and Internet connectivity were exposed during COVID-19 school closures when they posed an immense barrier to distance and hybrid teaching.
• holistic and inclusive policy dialogue that genuinely involves teachers, during the development, implementation and assessment of teaching policies and practices that promote fair opportunities for all teachers.
• innovations in recruitment, as current approaches are failing to close teacher gaps. New approaches should focus on creating new pathways into teaching for people from groups underserved and underrepresented in teacher workforces. Establishing such pathways will help to close not only the numbers gap but also demographic gaps, for example by positioning local role models from local communities who use local dialects in hard-to-staff classrooms across the globe.  
• quality professional development for all to increase levels of teacher retention. If we are to “retain the trained” we need to support countries along every stage of their journey in designing, implementing and evaluating high-quality and effective teacher professional development programmes and systems. If we fail to “retain the trained” by 2030 we will have failed to heed the warnings by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics in 2014 that by 2030, 89% (24 million teachers) of the teacher gap will be caused by attrition.

Helping 175 million children learn moves us closer to the shared vision expressed in SDG4. The international education community will be able to maintain the momentum created by the Global Education Summit – and help to ensure quality teachers for all – at the 13th Policy Dialogue Forum and governance meetings of the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, which will be held in Kigali, Rwanda, and online from December 1 to December 3, 2021. The meetings provide the ideal setting to come together again and invest in teachers now ­to ensure sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and prepare today’s learners for tomorrow.

Have your say in developing, implementing and assessing teaching policies

The Inclusion and Equity in Teacher Policies and Practices Thematic group is launching a series of online discussions – synchronous (September 2021) and asynchronous (October and November). The discussions are designed to allow you to get involved with shaping policies and practices that promote fair opportunities for all teachers. By sharing your knowledge, you can help bridge the growing gaps in teacher recruitment, preparation and deployment, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19.

Your engagement in this inclusive policy dialogue will ensure teachers and their representative organizations have a greater voice in policy-making processes. You can participate in these discussions at a time and place convenient to you, increasing the diversity of perspectives on how to provide pathways into teaching for the underserved, vulnerable and underrepresented (including migrants, people with disabilities, indigenous people, ethnic minorities and the poor), closing the teacher numbers gap across the globe.

Details of the first synchronous session on September 24 will be posted on the TTF website. If you are already a TTF member, please visit the TTF website and join the Inclusion and Equity in Teacher Policies and Practices thematic group in the Member Space before the event so you can receive information on TTF events. If you are not a TTF member, please contact the coordinators of the thematic group: Purna Shrestha at purna.shrestha@vsoint.org or James O’meara at james.omeara@tamiu.edu.

Photo: The teacher and her students in a Rwanda primary school. Credit: GPE

The COVID-19 crisis, with its lockdowns and school closures, shed light on the urgent needs of the education sector as well as the vital role of teachers. As governments scrambled to meet the pressing education needs of students, teachers and communities, it became clear that teachers not only are key to ensuring quality education but also are in dire need of greater support.

During the Global Education Summit: Financing the Global Education Partnership 2021-2025, held in London in late July 2021, the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 organized a side event, “The best investment – Supporting Teachers in COVID-19 recovery and beyond”. A panel of policy makers, teacher advocates and practitioners offered a wide range of perspectives on the needs of teachers as well as promising ways of enlisting funds and supporting teachers in a holistic way.

Supporting teachers and education: a question of political will

Political will is needed to place education at the top of the public investment agenda.  Aminta Navarro of the Global Campaign for Education noted that governments need to realize that they must give priority to investing in education if they want to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. In the context of the current crisis and beyond, it should be a question not of allocating resources one way or another but of governments showing political resolve by deciding to spend on education.

The Peruvian government sought to display such political resolve during the COVID-19 crisis by enlarging its education budget and focusing on those who needed help the most. Peru’s then Minister of Education, Ricardo Cuenca, explained how his transitional government led a massive campaign to support rural teachers who serve disadvantaged communities during the crisis. Coming up with funds to support rural teachers during the crisis required being strategic. Dr. Cuenca noted that making concrete and detailed proposals to the Economics and Finance Ministry allowed the Education Ministry to augment the rural teacher budget allocation by 250%. This increment supported actions that included changing rules regarding teaching conditions and working hours, and allowing for more collaboration between teachers. It also enabled:

• training rural teachers in digital and specific distance-learning pedagogical skills;
• supplying teachers with tablets and Internet connections to enable them to work remotely;
• opening a line to provide teachers with socioemotional support as they confronted the crisis;
• putting into place a massive vaccination campaign for rural teachers.

Investing in teachers: meeting benchmarks and closing gaps

Citing the internationally agreed funding benchmark of spending 20% of the national budget on education, Dennis Sinyolo, Chief Regional Coordinator for Africa for Education International, called on governments to meet this benchmark and invest adequately in education and in teachers in particular. Aminta Navarro suggested that countries expand tax bases and modify national debt payments to assign more resources to education. As recognized in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal, teachers have a critical role in education and in the life of students and communities, and therefore must be the priority in education budgets.

Investing in teachers must go beyond teacher salaries and hiring. Comprehensive training, continuous support, a motivating environment as well as adequate resources are also key to ensuring that teachers can not only provide quality education but also remain motivated. All these elements must be costed into education budgets.

Rwanda has been investing heavily in holistic professional development and school leadership that considers teachers’ complex needs. The country’s Education Minister, Valentine Uwamariya, said her government acknowledges that high quality teacher and school leader training and engagement contributes directly to achieving the desired levels of student learning. Dr. Uwamariya detailed the efforts being made in Rwanda for pre-service and continuous professional development. Primary- and secondary-level programs support school-based peer learning, coaching, career guidance and counseling. Attention is given to fostering teachers’ well-being, providing special motivation incentives and promoting professional standards. There is also particular consideration to reviewing teaching methods, including those related to digital learning.

Many countries struggle to meet the needs of their teachers, despite dedicating a large portion of their education budget to their wages. Using the example of Sub-Saharan Africa, Carlos Vargas, Chief of UNESCO’s Section for Teacher Development and Head of the TTF’s Secretariat, pointed out that even though more than 90% of the education budget goes into teacher salaries in 13 out of the 28 countries reporting this indicator in the region, salaries remain low and teacher shortages are enormous and persistent. He explained that these shortages are the result of a combination of factors including poor working conditions, low salaries, and a lack of training and professional development. This illustrates well why a more holistic approach to supporting teachers, coupled with domestic and international funding, is crucial to closing the teacher gap.

To invest smartly in education, include teachers in policymaking

Dennis Sinyolo pointed out that involving teachers in policy making profoundly enhances the quality and relevance of educational policies. For this to happen, social dialogue is of critical importance, and it needs to be institutionalized and legislated. Teachers are more than just implementors of policy. They have an on-the-ground perspective that allows them to identify needs and help better budget them. That is why it is vital to include teachers and teacher unions from an early stage when making decisions about planning, monitoring, evaluation and implementation.

Involving teachers in policymaking requires viewing and treating teachers as professionals. However, the de-professionalization and casualization of teaching have become global trends, so governments need to boost teacher development by making more efforts to facilitate high-quality teacher education, both pre-service and in-service.  

There is an urgent need to invest in teacher professionalization especially in rural areas

The lack of formal teacher training is most acute in rural areas. Babuo Abba, a refugee teacher from the Central African Republic who arrived in Chad in 2014, explained that in Chad’s rural areas most teaching is done by community teachers who lack formal credentials. This lack of training and certification often results in attrition, as community teachers leave teaching because they are not viewed as teaching professionals and therefore are not granted proper remuneration, work conditions, professional development, let alone get a say on educational policy. COVID-19 aggravated the situation of these teachers. Lacking formal status, they did not have access to the resources they needed during the crisis and were often not paid during school closures. This resulted in massive teacher attrition.

Teacher professionalization must be holistic and culturally relevant

Echoing Babuo Abba’s concerns, Cindy Leafland from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Suriname explained that, in her country, rural teachers often lack qualifications because they have less access to training than urban teachers. Moreover, rural students and teachers suffer because both curricula and assessments lack cultural relevance. While there is a need to strengthen national standards, these must allow for authentic learning experiences for teachers and learners in a variety of settings, and not just in urban contexts. To foster more holistic and context-sensitive teacher training, Leafland suggested different forms of mentoring and modeling that could take place between novice and more experienced teachers.

COVID-19 has challenged educational systems around the world, but as we learned from this panel discussion at the GPE summit, the pandemic has also provided an opportunity to reflect on what needs to be prioritized and, in some cases, a chance to leap into action. Investing in education is crucial not only to repair the losses brought about by the pandemic, but also to redirect efforts towards a more sustainable future. Investing in teachers in a holistic and context-sensitive manner is a crucial way of ensuring that future generations receive the education that they need in order to deal with an increasingly complex world.

Photo credit: Yoly Gutierrez/CIFOR, taken in Peru.