On World Teachers’ Day, celebrated last Saturday, October 5th, this year’s theme was “Valuing teacher voices: towards a new social contract for education,” with the aim of acknowledging their role and the expert knowledge they bring to education. The right to participate in community life and the guarantee of access to scientific and cultural progress (Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) lead us to reflect on the importance of education and teachers in building more inclusive and freer societies.
If the teacher is one of the greatest predictors of success in school, the importance of their participation in the construction of educational policies becomes clear. Schools are not changed by decree or from the outside, which is why it is crucial that scientific and specialized knowledge is produced with teachers’ active participation. It is not about producing knowledge or creating resources for teachers and schools, but with teachers and with schools.
Bernard Charlot (2006, p. 11) reminds us that the knowledge produced in education arises from the interaction between “knowledge (sometimes from diverse sources), practices, and policies,” and it is based on this premise that work is conducted and knowledge is produced in the Educational Sciences, as exemplified by the project TeachXevidence: Preventing gender-based violence in schools based on scientific evidence with social impact (2023-2025) funded by the European Commission. This project’s action is grounded in the construction of scientific knowledge through dialogue between universities, schools, and teacher training centers. In this sense, we argue that teaching professionalism is built through dialogue and constant interaction with the different actors involved in school life, as well as through the reflection underlying teachers’ pedagogical choices.
Being a teacher is being a co-creator of knowledge in the sense that this is not an exercise carried out in the solitude of everyday life, but through sharing and interacting with others.
[Image: Unsplash]
Researcher in Centre for Research and Intervention in Education of Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto, Portugal