Dear Editor,
Teachers are a central part in all our lives and in every one of our societies. This has never been clearer than during the COVID-19 crisis -”underlined”.
While, every year, World Teachers’ Day reminds us of the critical role teachers play in achieving inclusive, quality education for all, and despite the fallout with our teachers over vaccination, the PPP/C Government will continue to invest in our teachers, and prioritise them in Guyana’s education recovery efforts, so that every learner has access to a qualified and supportive teacher.
Let’s stand with our teachers! This year’s World Teachers’ Day has an even greater significance in light of the challenges that teachers have faced during the COVID-19 crisis.
As the pandemic has shown, teachers make a crucial contribution to ensuring continuity of learning and supporting the mental health and wellbeing of their students.
As we pay tribute to teachers, education support personnel and union members lost to COVID-19, we must remind our governments of their responsibility to ensure safe working conditions and vaccine equity.
Together, we must honour the teachers we have lost during the COVID pandemic, celebrate their lives and legacy, and recommit to making safe working conditions and vaccine equity a reality for all across Guyana.
As teachers, you bear a great responsibility, while your work is helping children learn as they grown to reach their full potential, you being friends, allies, and mentors with great influence over our nation’s young minds. The bonds you build in your classrooms often last a lifetime. This is why the loss of so many teachers is especially heart-breaking for students.
As we mourn the loss of so many educators, we can find comfort in the fact that their spirit lives on in all the students they taught, motivated, and inspired along their careers.
In this crisis, teachers have shown, as they have done so often, great leadership and innovation in ensuring that learning never stops, that no learner is left behind.
With leadership of the Minister of Education, you have worked individually and collectively to find solutions and create new learning environments for your students, to allow education to continue. Your role in advising on school reopening, plans, and supporting students with the return to school is just as important.
It is important that we collectively start thinking beyond COVID-19, and work to build greater resilience in our education systems, so teachers can respond quickly and effectively to these and other such crises. This means protecting education financing, investing in high-quality initial teacher education, as well as continuing the professional development of the existing teacher workforce.
Without urgent action and increased investment, a learning crisis could turn into a learning catastrophe. Even before COVID-19, more than half of all ten-year-olds in low- to middle-income homes could not understand a simple written story.
To build a more resilient teacher workforce in times of crisis, all teachers and their students should be equipped with digital and pedagogical skills to teach remotely, online, and through blended or hybrid learning, whether in high-, low- or no-tech environments.
Our Government should ensure the availability of digital infrastructure and connectivity everywhere, including in rural and remote areas, at the same time reintroducing the One Laptop Per Family initiative, which was discontinued by the former APNU/AFC Administration.
In the context of COVID-19, our PPP/C Government, social partners and other key stakeholders have an even greater responsibility regarding teachers. As we call on the PPP/C Government to protect teachers’ safety, health, and wellbeing, we ask also that their employment be protected by making COVID-19 vaccination for teachers’ mandatory. When teaching face-to-face, their chances of contracting the virus are of course increased.
Teachers played a critical role in keeping education open for hundreds of thousands of students here in Guyana, and this in itself required enormous sacrifices. For example, teachers had to take on additional workload, master new technologies for distance learning, and prepare new lessons.
As our PPP/C Government continues improving teachers’ working conditions and involve teachers and their representative organisations in the COVID-19 educational response and recovery, now is the time to recognise the role of teachers in helping to ensure a generation of students can reach their full potential, and the importance of education for short-term stimulus, economic growth and social cohesion during and after COVID-19.
Now is the time to reimagine education and achieve our vision of equal access to quality learning for every child and young person, including the early retired adults.
Teachers have the biggest role in nation-building. As mentors, guides, and knowledge-givers, teachers shoulder the responsibility of nurturing the younger generation with wisdom, skills and the right attitude towards life.
Sincerely,
David Adams
