Around ninety final year Pre-Primary and Primary Education students recently had the opportunity to attend a round table on professional opportunities for educators. Moderated by Professor Salvador Vidal, Vice-Dean of the Faculty, other people attending the event included Pilar Casals, an Inspector from the Department for Education (in the Catalan Government), and Pepi Boada, Head of the Centre for Pedagogical Resources in Santa Coloma. Eduard Martorell, Editor of the Catalan Encyclopaedia Foundation and a Professor at the Faculty of Education itself also attended the event.
Martorell highlighted the fact that Barcelona is a city that has many publishing houses, more than thirty, and that they all need illustrators and teachers who are capable of acting as consultants on these jobs, whether on paper or digital. In the words of this Professor of biology, “working in a publishing house is exciting since it means working in a team and it makes you think about what could work, what doesn’t and what can be improved. Sometimes teachers forget that this job opportunity exists in the publishing world”.
Pepi Boada then presented the website for the Centre for Pedagogical Resources (CRP) where she works. The CRP offers an educational service which consists of providing support to various centres and professors. The institution carries out various lifelong learning and continuing education courses of different types, such as for example open learning or learning aimed at specific groups of people. These educational cycles have a duration of between fifteen and thirty hours per year. They also offer other online resources. A scientific method for working in the classroom and various events and get-togethers stand out among these resources.
At the end of the event, the Inspector from the Department of Education explained what people need to do to sign up to the Catalan Government’s job bank for teachers. She reminded attendees that teachers are submitted to a teaching competence assessment a few months after they begin to work in a school. She also underlined the fact it is important to go onto the Department’s website to read the requirements that are necessary to sign up to the lists. To be a teacher, according to Casals “you have to have knowledge, but you also need to know how to act and how to react”.
At the end of the event the floor opened up to questions and the Inspector from the Department of Education was asked the most questions. This event left a good impression among attendees.
