Advances and reflections on TPD systems in the Global South at the event: “Teacher Professional Development Systems for Equity and Quality: Tinkering or Shifting the Paradigm?”
October 17, 2024
This morning (September 26) and in context with the second Global Meeting of the Empowering Teachers Initiative: TPD@Scale (ETI), the event “Teacher Professional Development Systems for Equity and Quality: Tinkering or Shifting the Paradigm?” took place, led by FIT-ED, Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development and SUMMA, the Laboratory for Education Research and Innovation in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The event, which took place in Hanoi, Vietnam, was attended by important educational representatives from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, and delved into the advances in teacher professional development in the global south.
At the beginning of the seminar, Fernando Perini, Team Leader for Education and Science at the International Development Research Centre, gave some words of welcome: “We all know that teachers are the backbone of our education systems, they make education meaningful particularly for children from vulnerable backgrounds, but many teachers are working in very tough conditions these days with limited training, low recognition and inadequate pay. These obstacles can definitely prevent them from doing their best job in the classroom, the TPD@Scale Coalition is here to help that by improving teacher professional development on a large scale”.
For his part, Prof. Le Anh Vinh, Director General of the Vietnam National Institute of Educational Sciences and Director of the National Center for Sustainable Development of General Education Quality, commented that “The quality of the education systems depends a lot on the quality of the teachers”. He also added that ”This kind of meeting, this kind of collaboration work is very important, when we can come, we can share and we can learn from each other how to have a TPD for the teacher in a more effective way”.
Next, Freda Wolfenden, Professor of Education and International Development at the Open University, UK, and Research Lead for ETI, gave a presentation on how to move forward in TPD, in which she suggested that “TPD systems need to be designed to built on what teachers know, not treat them as having little knowledge or capacity, to enable teachers to plan and experience coherent learning journeys”. In addition, she said that “TPD systems also need to be flexible, including different modalities and provision to enable professional learning to be matched to the development needs of the teacher, their classroom, their school context, their previous experiences, their characteristics”.
This was followed by a panel discussion with the participation of Carlos Vargas, Head of the Secretariat for the Teachers’ Task Force at UNESCO; Professor Padma Sarangapani, Head of the Centre for Teacher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India; Dr. Jolly M. Rubagiza, Associate Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Rwanda and Co-Principal Investigator in the ETI program with the British Council and Sebastian Fuentes, Coordinator of the Program Education, Knowledge, and Society in the Education area at FLACSO, Argentina. The panel was moderated by Cher Ping Lim, Chair Professor of Learning Technologies and Innovation at the Education University of Hong Kong, Co-director of the Global Institute of Emerging Technologies, and ETI Impact Lead, and it was discussed which was the best option for the global south: incremental reforms or fundamental changes in the way TPD systems are approached at scale.
The event was closed by Dante Castillo, SUMMA’s Director of Policy and Innovative Practices, who spoke about the opportunities the Coalition has designed for translating knowledge into action. In this regard, he pointed out that “There is a need to rethink and explore innovative approaches about how systems can support and promote teacher professional learning. We have to pay attention to issues of equity, quality and coherence. Using a well known image we have to deal with a very complex issue, an issue of recognition, redistribution and participation”. He finally concluded that: “We need incremental changes in our practices but more radical changes in our ideas”.
Learn more about the TPD@Scale Coalition
