Celebrate World Teachers' Day!

To raise awareness, understanding and appreciation of the important role teachers play in education, we celebrate World Teacher’s Day on the 5th of October. World Teacher’s Day commemorates the adoption in 1966 of the ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the status of teachers and this year’s event highlights the need to empower teachers to contribute to building sustainable societies.

Today there is an ongoing challenge to train enough teachers and trainers for ever changing learning environments. With an estimated 1.7 million new teachers required to reach universal primary education by 2015, the recruiting of new teachers must go hand in hand with improving the quality of teaching and learning. This year’s event also comes at a timely moment, with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September, and particularly Goal 4 which, among other things, calls for a substantial increase of qualified teachers.

Teachers and trainers in TVET

UNESCO-UNEVOC recognises the important role teachers and trainers play in technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In order to stimulate the sharing of information on vocational pedagogy and advocate the strengthening of TVET teacher education, UNESCO-UNEVOC has organized a number activities, such as virtual and face-to-face discussion fora.

At the recent eLearning Africa conference in Addis Ababa in May 2015 on ICTs in TVET participants discussed the question of how to prepare teachers and trainers to effectively use digital media in TVET. The use of ICTs in TVET does not only require teachers to be capable to use computer programmes or mobile phones in the classroom, but also to have the knowledge, skills and tools to meet the new challenges ICT brings in the daily life of work and education. With this in mind, teachers and trainers have a key role to play in improving education by widening access, ensuring quality and inclusiveness, and promoting education for global citizenship and sustainable development.

For more information regarding the workshop, please follow this link: http://www.unevoc.unesco.org/go.php?q=eLearning+Africa+comes+to+Addis+Ababa.

More information

World Teacher’s Day is an internationally recognized day; for more information on UNESCO’s activities to mark this event, please visit the following page.

For more information regarding UNESCO-UNEVOC’s work in the area of teachers and trainers, please look at our publications.