Teacher training colleges used to be unfashionable. Young professionals from the Middle East, riding on the wave of low unemployment and high graduate recruitment during the boom years, turned to finance, construction, law and medicine for well-paid, well-respected work; teaching barely got a glance. 

But late in 2009, the options for driven young people in the region are less abundant. With fewer opportunities in the “prestigious” industries that have characterized the recent professional landscape of the Gulf states in particular, more and more people are returning to school. One institute, founded in 2007 on the cusp of global financial meltdown, is determined to give teaching the esteem it deserves, and make education an automatic choice for the region’s best and brightest.

Everything about Emirates College of Advanced Education – its gleaming, futuristic campus easily as impressive as any of the skyscrapers peppering downtown Abu Dhabi – symbolizes originality. Its classrooms are bright and airy, with the latest educational technology integrated into every lesson. Its multinational staff uses cutting-edge techniques harnessed from educational systems across the globe, and its student body, as fresh as the paint on its walls, experiences a curriculum specifically geared to teaching.

By Patrick Galey