TU Dortmund University Awarded UNESCO Chair
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“The network of UNESCO Chairs unites brilliant minds throughout the world in order to develop sustainable and creative solutions for the challenges of our times,” says Professor Maria Böhmer, President of the German Commission for UNESCO. “It plays a key role in the implementation of the global Sustainable Development Goals by offering ideas, innovations and mutual support. I’m very pleased that the new UNESCO Chair is dedicated to technical and vocational education and training with an international perspective and will contribute to enhancing the importance of this highly topical issue in the network.”
Approach helps implement Sustainable Development Goals
The Chair is responsible for the further development of technical and vocational education and training research as well as instruction for vocational teachers at national and international level. It fosters practice-oriented dialogue between academia and politics in order to advance the development of vocational training systems worldwide. The Chair cooperates particularly closely with universities in East and Southeast Asia. Professor Schröder’s work is thus in line with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York in September 2015.
Reformed training systems thanks to transnational cooperation
“The award of the UNESCO Chair is an acknowledgement of TU Dortmund University’s contribution so far to the study and development of international technical and vocational education and training systems,” says Professor Thomas Schröder. “It also includes a mandate to continue this work, whereby we will also take into account the goals of the United Nations.” Professor Schröder moved from Tongji University (Shanghai) to the Faculty of Education, Psychology and Sociology at TU Dortmund University in 2016. In East and Southeast Asia he set up a university research platform and supported transnational research projects that led to reforms in the training of vocational teachers in Thailand and Laos as well as to the establishment of the Regional Association for Vocational Teacher Education in Asia.
Through their work, the UNESCO Chairs heighten cooperation with universities, other research institutions and social actors in countries of the Global South, in Germany and in Europe.