The Queen Rania Teacher Academy (QRTA) was founded in 2009 to raise the quality of educational outcomes in Jordan, by developing the skills of teachers through continuous training, professional development and peer support.
In January 2019, QRTA celebrated its 10th anniversary, as part of a continuum of educational development which started over 100 years ago with the birth of modern Jordan.
On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, QRTA also inaugurated its new headquarters in the forested campus of the University of Jordan, surrounded by other respected educational and scientific institutions. The opening ceremony was attended by His Majesty King Abdullah and Her Majesty Queen Rania, who officially inaugurated the building.
The audience watched a short film created and directed by SYNTAX, and produced with our strategic production partners, Labiba Productions. The film had a challenging vision and a tight deadline, having been initiated and delivered in less than one month, yet maintained high production values around its core story and message.
Our aim was to honor generations of pioneering educators in Jordan, and to showcase the impact of a modern educational philosophy and teacher training efforts on the overall quality of education. By featuring teachers in service, trainee teachers as well as a mother and a teacher trainer, the film emphasizes the centrality of the role of the teacher in society and the impact teachers have on children‘s psychology, curiosity and passions.
The film was shot in Amman and Madaba, to visually emphasize QRTA‘s mission of modernizing teacher training all over the Kingdom. Drone footage was utilized to showcase the new QRTA building at the heart of Amman‘s higher educational and innovation zone.
The film celebrates the new building, designed by the Jordanian architectural firm, Faris & Faris, as a marker of the longstanding impact that QRTA has had over the past decade. The highly practical and environmentally conscious building embodies the values of innovation, openness, dialogue and continuous improvement. It reminds us of Jordan’s leap into modernity era in the 1950s and 1960s, and also manages to transport us into the future, contribution to the architectural landscape of Amman.
Ultimately, the building is represented as a stepping stone to a better educational future. After ten years of refining its “software” of teacher training and outreach, QRTA now has the “hardware”, a highly functional building that will facilitate the training of a greater number of teachers, to deal with the immense challenges of educating a new generation of Jordanian children, to be ready for the world of today and tomorrow.
(A special thank you goes to double-shift.org project for granting us permission to use video clips by Marjam Fels and Paula Ellguth, who documented the life inside one of Jordan’s public schools)
