The purpose of education received a powerful boost at the Qudwa Forum held in Abu Dhabi with the assurance that teachers in UAE will be enabled by autonomy to be empowered in order to fulfil their true role as thought leaders to future generations. Teachers as the fount of innovation who nurture the spirit of enquiry in young minds is, and has been, timelessly integral to pedagogy. However, the quotidian mechanics of what passes for teaching in many schools has obscured this truth for some time now as the learning process has become largely a regurgitation of information by students who seem to be in a stampede to acquire the highest marks. This approach, anachronistic at its worst and ineffective at its best, has a stifling tendency for both teachers and students.
In a world awash with highly fluid patterns of new genres of information that demand breakaway thinking and action, education needs to keep up and the only way it can do so is if teachers are able to stay two steps ahead of the times. The greater the autonomy for a teacher seeking their true north of knowledge, the better the outcome for students as they try to find their feet in today’s world.
The Qudwa Forum was also right in proposing that teacher empowerment must be in consonance with allied imperatives — a revamped approach to curricula based on teacher participation, teacher engagement with other industries and areas in society to create cross-platform knowledge disbursement and freedom to fashion their own professional development. This is critical foresight that will ensure education wrests back for itself what is rightfully its true calling — a teacher-student symbiosis that builds our tomorrows.
