On October 6th, 2015 the first year Master’s students of the Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology majoring in Language Education together with their teachers — members of the working group of the project TEMPUS “Developing the Teaching of European Languages: Modernising Language Teaching through the development of blended Masters Programmes” (544161-TEMPUS-1 -2013-1-UK-TEMPUS-JPCR Aston University) celebrated their professional holiday, the International Teacher’s Day. For these students of the educational programme “Teaching languages with the use of online technologies” the day became a most memorable event as it marked their dedication to the profession of a language teacher.

Opening the event, the head of the Master’s programme Prof. Natalia Fenenko in her welcome speech noted that when the Bachelor graduates in Linguistics chose the Master’s programme in Language Education, they made their choice in favour of the most humane among many other important professions.

The head of the Centre for Career Development Marina Shcherbakova pointed to the social significance of the teaching profession and the labour market demand for language teachers in particular. She also gave her comments on the prospects for Master’s students and characterised their career opportunities very positively.

Then, the students (Victoria Novikova, Oleg Borisov, Elena Esikova, and Anastasia Novikova) made their presentations and showed how the image of a teacher is portrayed in the fine arts, in literature, and in feature films. All the Master’s students took part in an entertaining quiz with various questions about school and a pedagogical contest where they had to find a solution to conflict situations borrowed from real school life. Having gone through all the tests, the students swore allegiance to the profession of a language teacher.