The UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office for the Arab States – Beirut and the Arab Thought Foundation (ATF) launched today the “Repository of Promising Teaching and Learning Practices”, at UNESCO Beirut. This achievement comes within the second phase of their joint project Partnership for Arab Educational Development, also known as ‘Tarbiyah21’. The Repository represents one of the most prominent outputs of the Tarbiyah21 project, and the culmination of a cooperation that brought together ATF and UNESCO Beirut, for over a decade, during which they joined efforts in supporting teachers and developing their competencies, as well as supporting Arab countries to implement the 2030 Education Agenda which commits to providing inclusive and equitable quality education for all. The launching ceremony was opened with a number of keynote speeches, starting with a welcome note by the Director of UNESCO Beirut, Costanza Farina who praised the ‘robust partnership between UNESCO Beirut and Arab Thought Foundation, which is based on the shared belief in the critical importance of quality education for both the development of individuals and that of their communities and society at large, and on our mutual commitment to strategically contribute to the education development of the Arab region’. She added: ‘I am delighted to see that the content of our Repository of Promising Teaching and Learning Practices is fully aligned with the ambitions and the directions for action that TES (the Transforming Education Summit of September 2022) has put forward. I am sure that when browsing through the Repository, you will find many inspirational ideas to try out in your own context. And I am also sure that many more of such interesting examples await to be discovered, shared, and disseminated. We hope the Repository will provide some answers to important and recurrent questions, that routinely are left unanswered. I also very much treasure the opportunity that the Arab Though Foundation has given us to collect such initiatives in a systematized way, to serve for learning from one another and to encourage further research, dissemination, and capacity development.’ In turn, ATF’s Director General, Henri Awit, said that ‘it was natural for ATF and the UNESCO organization, through its Beirut office, to establish a distinguished cooperation, as both of them place education at the heart of their interests and at the top of their priorities’. He added: ‘This project was based on our realization of the need to take into account the deep and radical shifts that have taken place in terms of educational visions, concepts and methods. It has become acknowledged that the student, not the teacher, is the focus of the educational process, and that it is therefore necessary to move them from the position of the recipient to the position of the active participant, in light of the modern concept of education that is based not on the principle of teaching but on the principle of learning, and what this requires in terms of replacing traditional methods based on memorization and indoctrination, with active and interactive methods. It goes without saying that achieving all of this depends, to a large extent, on the teacher, who remains the mediator, the guide, the mover and the lever.’ The event was held under the auspices of the Minister of Education and Higher Education in Lebanon, Abbas Al-Halabi, who said: ‘I looked carefully into this joint initiative between the UNESCO Regional Office and the Arab Thought Foundation, and I believe that the two sides have reached the limits of achievement in such unprecedented circumstances in Lebanon and the Arab world, in terms of providing a reference for promising teaching and learning practices, and the guidance note for the teacher, in an effort to inform those interested about recent trends related to the learning profession, and the competencies that they must develop and master to meet these expectations.’ ‘The era of technology in education and digital transformation has imposed new approaches that no educational system can be immune from, especially since we are currently in the middle of a national workshop to develop curricula for school subjects, which requires conscious involvement in digital transformation and professional development of teachers, and the promotion of collaborative projects in order to reach with quality the goals that we have set and what we aspire to in education’. This Repository comprises a compendium of 130 templates that elicit innovative and promising teaching and learning practices that different categories of stakeholders contributed with as reflective practitioners based on self-reported experiences. Those templates were selected out of 300 submissions received by UNESCO – Beirut from educators in the Arab region. The Repository collected and categorized them based on the following axes: quality of teaching and learning; digital transformation in education; teacher professional development; collaborations and partnerships; educational research. The ceremony also featured a presentation on another byproduct of the “Tarbiyah21” project; the Teacher Guidance Notes which includes a summary of the important lessons learned in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (and beyond), and guidelines for improving teachers’ performance, through the provision of adequate training, resources and incentives. It should be noted that the second phase of Tarbiyah21, which was concluded with the launch of the Repository and the guidance notes, was launched in 2019, as a continuation of the first phase that resulted in the creation of a website called Tarbiyah21, which documents innovative teaching and learning practices, and makes them available to teachers and trainers in the hope of empowering them. This website was further developed during the second phase, in addition to the dissemination of a monthly newsletter with a special bulletin of events related to the ‘Tarbiyah21’ project, which was sent in both Arabic and English to a large database of more than 13,000 educational practitioners.
Source: National News Agency – Lebanon