A portable solar suitcase with a battery and solar panel, eco bricks, electricity from seawater, and 3D printed coral reefs… these are just a few of the innovative solutions imagined and implemented by teachers and learners through the Climate Action Project.

Belgian IT teacher, Koen Timmers, created the Climate Action Project in 2017. He envisioned it as a useful resource to help teachers incorporate climate change into their lesson plans. He didn’t expect it to become a global movement in just five years.

The project is helping to transform education and support teachers by creating a space for climate change and sustainable lifestyles in the curriculum. It also promotes a global outlook by encouraging dialogue and collaboration between learners in different countries.

Today, over 10 million learners from 107 countries have taken part in the six-week online course which has been endorsed by world-renowned conservationist Dr Jane Goodall, Amnesty International, Microsoft, WWF, NASA, UNESCO, the UN Environment Programme, and ministries of education across 16 countries.

Transformative teaching encourages learners to take action

“Climate change is something that’s affecting everyone, everywhere. I created the project so that students and teachers from all over the world could talk about this issue, learn from each other, and take action,” says Koen. And that, he believes, is the key to the project’s success.

“You can learn by reading a textbook, you can learn from a teacher, you can learn from a newspaper. But in all of those cases, you really only have one side of the story,” says Koen. “But when you are able to speak to someone living on another continent, and you realise you share passions (like football and sustainability), you build a relationship with them.”

Using technology to transform and expand teaching platforms

Koen’s passion has always been to help transform the field of education. “I wanted to work with people. I really love explaining stuff, and I wanted to do something that was relevant in society, so I became a teacher.”

Since 2016, Koen has been involved in helping to set up and equip a learning centre in the Kakuma refugee camp.  Through the facility, over 420 teachers from 75 countries around the world offer online lessons to the learners in the refugee camp. 

“Through these classes, learners from different countries are able to have meaningful conversations with the learners at Kakuma,” says Koen. “It helps all of the learners develop a global outlook and break down stereotypes.”  

It is this online interaction between learners from around the world that inspired Koen’s Climate Action Project.

Supporting the SDGs through the Climate Action Project

As well as being a useful teaching resource, Koen’s vision for the Climate Action Project was to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by giving teachers and learners a platform to help create positive change in the world.

“I wanted to make a way for students from all across the world to connect with each other, to share how climate change is affecting them, and to be empowered to create solutions.”

“I think what surprised me the most about the Climate Action Project is how different the stories are,” says Koen.

Participants in Ireland convinced the government to create a new logo for recyclable plastics while learners in India built a solar-powered car. In Malawi, students planted 60 million trees, in the US they built a portable solar-powered battery pack in a suitcase, and in Indonesia they developed their own ecobricks.

Koen and his partners also developed the EarthProject app which allows users to track their climate-friendly behaviour, such as avoiding red meat, buying a refurbished phone, and ride-sharing. It adds up the amount of carbon saved through these actions.

The app proves that incorporating something like the Climate Action Project into lessons is one of the ways we can transform education and achieve the SDGs.

“Students are not only learning about climate change. They are taking action, and coming up with sustainable solutions.”

Prioritising teachers and learners is key to transforming education

While Koen supports the use of technology as a teaching resource, he believes that nothing is more effective than a passionate, skilled teacher.

“We need to increase teacher salaries so that we can get the very best teachers back into the classroom. To be a successful person you have to know how to solve problems, filter fake news, and build relationships with people who are different to you. That’s how teachers can help their students build a global outlook. And that, in my opinion, is the future of education.”

***

●       To join the Climate Action Project for free, register here: https://www.climate-action.info/user/register

●       The Kakuma Project, as well as several other educational facilities in the refugee camp are supported through donations to the Kakuma NPO. Partners include Maggie, UNHCR and TAG. 

●       The Climate Action Project is supported through Koen’s non-profit organisation, Take Action Global.

Learn more about the #TeachersTransform campaign as part of the Transforming Education Summit.

Photo credit: Koen Timmers

To mark the 2022 International Day of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond* reflects on the challenges and opportunities for teachers brought about by the global pandemic.

The education systems of today are too often inherited from decades-old structures and procedures, born in the industrial era, which have not evolved to meet the educational needs of the 21st century. However, the disruptions caused by the global pandemic have created a wide range of opportunities to reinvent education by opening up new roles for teachers to recreate schools. The COVID-19 pandemic has also made clear the urgency of capitalizing on innovations that have emerged for creating child-centred approaches to foster 21st century education systems.

In many countries, schools are being reinvented under the leadership of teachers. During the pandemic, teachers joined hands to innovate and support each other during school closures - by exchanging technical assistance in using new technologies, curating resources, using digital platforms, and developing innovative pedagogies, including those that build independence and resilience in learning. Novel approaches to education are appearing in teaching, teacher preparation and development, and school design.

During the crisis, teachers around the world led the efforts to connect students and their families to schools digitally (and in other ways) by ensuring access, sharing ideas with other teachers and with parents, and by creating partnerships. Many teachers demonstrated resourcefulness during the crisis leading content design, facilitating capacity building as peer leaders, mentoring and readily adopting and catalysing change within their schools. 

Ashok Pandy wrote that “teacher leadership has been redefined, reflecting a shift from conventional positional roles – coordinators, faculty heads, headmistresses, or vice-principals – ascribing power and authority to the holder. Teacher leadership is now determined by the proactive roles that teachers play, initiatives they undertake, and the support they render to leadership, students, and parents.”

Countries are urged to support teachers to develop and share their innovations for the future of education, advancing the necessary change to build back better education systems.

Learning and development: a whole child approach to education

During this time there has also been a growing awareness of new discoveries in the science of learning and child development, including the ways in which relationships and contexts determine brain development and learning.  These insights emphasize the need for a whole child approach to education that takes into consideration each student's academic, social, and emotional development in learner-centred and culturally relevant ways.

When this occurs, students thrive, as innovative schools in the United States have demonstrated.  Educators in cities from New York to Los Angeles have created personalized school models that rethink the factory model we inherited, which produces large anonymous schools with high dropout rates. These schools, which are run democratically and organized around teaching teams and advisory systems, allow teams of teachers to plan interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum for a shared group of students, while supporting them emotionally as well as academically.  

Many of these sites that rely on teacher leadership are community schools which help make education more relevant to students’ lives through an aligned curriculum that provides experiential education rooted in community concerns.  Such schools engage in strong partnerships with families, along with connections to local organizations that partner on afterschool activities and a wide range of health and social service supports.  As schools have built their capacity to more fully meet student needs, their students – especially those in low-income communities -- have experienced stronger academic success, graduation rates, and access to college.

Teacher leadership: reinventing teaching as an innovative and collaborative profession

A key aspect of building this capacity is developing environments that foster teacher collaboration, leadership, and decision-making as core elements of the school design, while involving teachers themselves in the process. In countries participating in the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), teachers who reported opportunities to participate in decision-making at the school level had higher levels of job satisfaction and were more likely to see teaching as a valued profession in their countries. However, only 42% of principals reported that their teachers have significant responsibility over a large share of tasks related to school policies, curriculum, and instruction, and just 56% reported that teachers have a role in the school management team.

Professional and collaborative working environments proved to be vital building blocks for developing collective teacher efficacy, which research suggests is one of the most crucial factors influencing student achievement.  The TALIS survey data show that, around the world, opportunities for teacher collaboration are strongly associated with their sense of efficacy and effectiveness.  Such opportunities are also associated with teachers’ willingness and ability to implement innovative practices like project-based learning, the use of new technologies, and the higher order skills needed for 21st century economies and societies.

Preparing the next generation of teachers to support student learning

A growing body of research has established that effective professional development, which produces gains in student achievement, is intensive, collaborative, job-embedded and classroom focused. In the TALIS study, while three quarters of teachers globally reported that their teaching practice was positively influenced by collaborative forms of professional development, only 44% reported participating in such professional learning.

Successful education systems prioritise time and other resources for teachers to collaborate, share knowledge and practices, and engage in collective decision-making to enable innovation, improve effectiveness, and build shared knowledge and collective efficacy in their teaching. This requires change in how we conceptualise and invest in teacher preparation, working conditions, professional learning, career pathways, remuneration and evaluation systems.

Preparing the next generation of teachers, with the best knowledge and support that our systems can offer, is ultimately the most powerful approach to enable student learning and directly contribute to transforming education. This is particularly true when those teachers adopt whole-child education strategies and pedagogies. To ensure teachers can innovate and that these can be scaled up effectively based on a whole-child paradigm, education systems need to listen to teachers and provide them with the tools they need - including effective training and various means of support. This includes integrating the family, community, and societal dimensions into curriculum, pedagogy, and organizational design.  Systems will also benefit by enabling teachers to innovate and lead in schools organized for professional collaboration, with opportunities to connect across schools and communities to share what they have invented and learned.  It is only by building on and expanding the creativity and capacity of teachers that we can design 21st century schools that truly meet students’ and societies’ needs.

*Linda Darling Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University and founding president of the Learning Policy Institute. You can access her full presentation at the following link: See ‘36:21.  

References

Pandey, A. K. (2021). Teacher leadership during COVID-19. Teacher India, 15(1): 10-12. https://research.acer.edu.au/teacher_india/39/

OECD (2020), TALIS 2018 Results (Volume II): Teachers and School Leaders as Valued Professionals, TALIS, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/19cf08df-en

OECD Education and Skills Today. (2020, January 22). Reflections on the Forum for World Education. OECD Education and Skills Today. Retrieved January 8, 2022, from https://oecdedutoday.com/reflections-forum-for-world-education/

Author: Inés Dussel* was one of the contributors to the flagship UNESCO report, "Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education" launched yesterday and author of a TTF background paper on “The Futures of Teaching”.

In 2021, humanity is at a critical inflection point. Facing enormous challenges – the climate crisis, radical technological change, democratic instability, the automation of work, and gigantic population shifts – we need, urgently, to create futures that are unlike our pasts. Teachers have a key role to play in this essential effort.

The Futures of Education initiative, launched by UNESCO in November 2019, proposes a new social contract in which education is viewed as a public and common good, which nurtures hope, imagination and action for a common future. The initiative seeks to mobilize ideas and action towards an educational change that can respond to the world’s enormous challenges.

Since the initiative’s launch, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the need for change. School closures and the accompanying rush towards remote education have shown that inequality of resources, infrastructure and outcomes persists. They have also given rise to a reconsideration of teachers’ role in fostering student learning and well-being.

As the pandemic has illustrated, conversations about the futures of teaching tend to focus on technological change, but there is much more to teaching than digital transformation. Teaching demands knowledge, competence, care and sensibility. Teachers are central to the mission of education to promote intellectual and affective autonomy, and to make common knowledge public and available to all.

Therefore, the new social contract must centre on teachers. In doing so, it must account for the paradoxes and challenges that teachers face as specialized agents. Teaching is not simply an individualistic endeavour depending solely on personal strengths or weaknesses; it is a heavily contextualized practice, institutionally defined and regulated. These rules and definitions are not consistent: current educational contexts make conflicting demands of teachers, which could impact on teaching’s potential futures. So, conversations about the futures of teaching need to avoid idealized and voluntaristic ideals of teaching and should instead focus on concrete working conditions, institutional support networks, pedagogical demands, and necessary competences and knowledge.

The clash between conflicting requirements cannot be resolved by individual teachers, nor can it be bridged solely by improving teaching strategies or promoting digital inclusivity. It must be addressed institutionally and through public policies that set regulations to protect and care for a common future.

The think piece, The futures of teaching, discusses some of the paradoxes and conflicting demands teachers face:

• Inclusive educational policies may be insufficiently supported and rely excessively on individual teachers’ actions and responsibility.
• Openness to the involvement of communities and families in teaching can give rise to different and even incompatible priorities.
• New educational ideals such as student-centred pedagogies cannot always be accommodated in current working conditions.
• An increase in regulations, along with new pedagogical frameworks, may overburden teachers by placing too many demands on performance.
• Digital transformation opens up new possibilities but also involves new risks, such as the massive delegation and reduction of knowledge into gigantic platforms that manage data.
• The ecological crisis necessitates promoting a collective consciousness of the planet that actively cares for the diversity of life, but policies aim to maintain business as usual.
• In all these tensions and demands, the gendered nature of teachers’ work needs to be taken into account, since it affects the organization of work time, tasks and burdens.

It is not a surprise that in many countries there is an increasing shortage of teachers and in others there is a growing sense of burnout and disenchantment with the teaching profession.  On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the relevance of teachers’ work and the need for expert guidance to support students’ learnings and well-being.

What can be done, then, to foster the role of teachers as central educational agents in the renewal of education? Here are some recommendations for policy-makers and stakeholders that should be implemented urgently, in order to help teachers to become a leading force in the renewal of education:

1. An open social dialogue must be promoted to develop cooperative solutions to the complex issues that are at stake in the futures of teaching.
2. Working conditions for teachers must be improved, not only by paying teachers appropriately, but also by ensuring adequate class sizes, school safety, symbolic recognition and legitimacy, and institutional support. 
3. Consistent policy and institutional responses must be developed to organize collective networks to tackle complex pedagogical issues.
4. Better balance is needed between administrative and pedagogical requirements, including by accounting for unpaid work outside school settings such as engagement with communities.
5. Teachers’ labour statutes and workloads should be thoroughly reviewed, in a gender-sensitive way, to align them with new educational goals and to expand the diversity of the teaching profession.
6. Competence, training and engagement with school programmes, including mentoring novice teachers, leading subject areas or cycles, and organizing educational services, should all be taken into account in the design of teachers’ career paths.
7. To enhance recruitment, policies should target novice teachers through establishing induction programmes with more experienced colleagues. Policies should also provide assistance for mid-career teachers who have become disenchanted with their work.
8. Teacher education needs to be rethought to address the challenges and disruptions pointed out by UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative. Curricula should include new and increasingly salient topics and realities such as environmental change and activism, democratic and ethical education, gender equality and diversity, digital critical skills and epistemic and intergenerational dialogues about our common futures. Methods should include clinical approaches and seek to anticipate real contexts of practice.
9. Teacher education can no longer underestimate the relevance of digital culture; without diminishing the role of the teacher, digital media needs to be included not only as a means for distance training but also as a topic for study.

Finally, the effort to imagine the futures of teaching should be used to open up public conversations about the expectations and realities of teaching – about the anxieties and fears that teachers experience, but also about the potential for teaching to act as a source of hope and transformation. The futures of teaching should become part of broad social dialogues that foster teachers’ force and engagement in the renewal of education, and in the construction of better futures for all.

*Inés Dussel is Professor and Researcher at the Department of Educational Research, Center for Advanced Research and Studies (DIE-CINVESTAV), Mexico City.

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.

Photo credit: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com 

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.