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- Volume 2019, Issue 4, 2019
The UNESCO Courier - Volume 2019, Issue 4, 2019
Volume 2019, Issue 4, 2019
To demonstrate a commitment that goes far beyond what is generally required by the profession, whether by choice or because the context demands it. This is why the teachers featured in this new issue of the UNESCO Courier – on the occasion of World Teachers' Day, celebrated each year on 5 October – have in common.
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Wide angle: A second-chance school in Montreal
Author: Lyne FréchetTo succeed where traditional schools have failed. This is the challenge that teachers at the Centre d’intégration scolaire (Centre for academic integration, CIS) in Montreal, Canada, face every day. The Frenchlanguage school takes in students whose educational paths have been rocky – gaining their trust is a prerequisite for any learning.
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The school under a bridge in New Delhi
Author: Sébastien FarcisFor the past nine years, Rajesh Kumar Sharma has been operating a makeshift school between two pillars of the aerial metro that runs across India’s capital. More than 200 children from the surrounding slums attend this open-air classroom every day.
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Mohamed Sidibay: The role of teachers is to restore our confidence
Author: Agnès BardonOrphaned at the age of five, Mohamed Sidibay became a child soldier during the civil war in Sierra Leone, and owes his survival to school. A tireless advocate of education, particularly through the Global Partnership for Education, he tells the story of his debt to a teacher who knew how to reach out to him.
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Congo: A class of seventy-six
Author: Laudes Martial MbonSaturnin Serge Ngoma, a teacher at La Poudrière primary school in Brazzaville, Congo, gives geometry and grammar lessons to a seriously overcrowded class every day. Teaching in a school that lacks everything is a constant struggle.
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Teach me if you can: From classrooms to the big screen
“To give back to teachers their status as life’s great heroes, because they change the destinies of children, and they change the future of the world”. This is the ambitious goal of Teach Me If You Can (working title), a feature-length documentary currently being produced by Winds, a French film production company. The idea, inspired by UNESCO – which is a partner in the film – is to present several portraits of teachers across the world who go above and beyond their job requirements, and to show the universal nature of their commitment.
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Teaching behind bars in Valparaiso
Author: Carolina Jerez HenríquezSituated on a hill in the seaport city of Valparaiso, on the Chilean coast, the Juan Luis Vives school was founded in 1999. Today it has 550 students. What makes it unique is that it is located inside the city’s prison. Every day, the teachers who work there are forced to cope with the challenges of the prison world – which include disparities in learning abilities, and emotions on edge. The school was awarded the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy in 2015.
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A teacher brings hope to a remote Chinese village
Author: Wang ShuoThe people who live in Heihumiao, in central China’s Henan province, often dream about leaving the mountains to find a better life in the city. Zhang Yugun also left. But once he graduated, he chose to return to the village where he grew up – to give the children a fighting chance.
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Zoom: Archive treasure: The unpublished album of David Seymour
Author: Giovanna HendelIt all began in the autumn of 2017, with the exploration of UNESCO’s audiovisual collections, after their transfer to the Organization’s archives. Most of the collections had barely been indexed in their almost seventy years of existence. Walking through these archives was a bit like visiting Jorges Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel. With thousands of documents in the archives, the only way to get an idea of how the collection was organized, was simply to open the drawers of the many old filing cabinets and take a look inside.
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Ideas: Architectural lessons for the future, via the past
Author: Amin Al-HabaibehModern cities, with their paved roads and glass towers, are hardly adapted to cope with the expected rise in temperatures. Designed to provide shade and air circulation, traditional buildings in the Middle East, Gulf and African countries could inspire more sustainable and environmentally-friendly habitats in other parts of the world.
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Our guest: Nelly Minyersky: The green queen
Author: Lucía Iglesias KuntzThrough their campaigns to protest gender violence and femicide, such as #NiUnaMenos (Not one less), and their fight for the legalization and decriminalization of abortion, Argentinian women are breaking new ground and transcending borders. The 90-year-old lawyer Nelly Minyersky is one of their most active representatives. So much so that some call her “the green queen”, because of the colour of the scarves worn by supporters of free and safe abortions – who demand, in short, a law “to not die”.
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Current affairs: An Inca suspension bridge is restored in Peru
Author: Jordi BusquéEvery year in the first week of June, the inhabitants of Peru’s Quehue district gather to restore the rope suspension bridge that connects the two banks of the Apurímac river. This centuries-old secular Andean tradition has been inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2013.
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From the holds of the Clotilda to Africatown
Author: Sylviane A. DioufIn May 2019, the news that archaeologists had discovered the wreck of the Clotilda – the last recorded slave ship to arrive in the United States, fifty-two years after the international slave trade had been outlawed – made headlines around the world. But all the attention focused on the ship’s owner, its captain, and the ship itself, rather than on the victims of this appalling journey.
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