On Thursday, 18 June 2015, the graduation ceremony for Preschool Education students was held in the main lecture hall at the UIC Barcelona. This year’s keynote speaker was Alba Espot, the Catalonia President of the European Forum on Educational Administration.
Espot encouraged the graduates, who are now qualified teachers, to carry on studying and retrain constantly. She said, “This is just your first graduation. Next it’ll be a master's degree, a postgraduate degree and so on, because today’s teachers need to be more and more knowledgeable”. She also stressed the importance of being university students and said “People who have been through university have the tools to control their lives better”.
To ensure they really grasped what she was saying, Espot went on to tell the new graduates, “Although I am close to retirement age, I still have a need to constantly update my knowledge. It’s a process that never ends”.
Class representatives Gemma Alamo and Núria García Montes spoke on behalf of the new graduates to stress that the ceremony wasn’t the end, but merely the beginning of a project for the future and for life.
Finally, Enric Vidal, the Dean of the UIC Barcelona Faculty of Education, encouraged the graduates never to lose “the desire to learn how to learn, and to learn to be excellent role models for your students and families".
