Established in 1988, CIIE has long embraced its mission of developing high-quality research on key issues of lifelong and life-wide education. The centre has an international reputation as an excellent context to research, innovate, and inspire change in education with and for educational communities. CIIE is also extremely well-known for its top-quality doctoral programme in Education Sciences, PDCE.
For 2025-2029, CIIE will host around 70 PhD full members, including professors and lecturers from FPCEUP, members from other HEIs and full-time researchers and postdoctoral research fellows. CIIE also engages 120 associate members, most of whom are full and part-time PhD students. PhD students, emerging and senior researchers all come together in small face-to-face collectives of research-in-the-making, the research communities of practice, CoPIn. CoPIns collaborate in large Research Groups (RGs) that, like neighbouring trees in a rhizomatic network, foster expansive learning and transformative agency within CIIE:

• PITE - Politics, Inequalities and Transformative Education;
• DJusT - Diversity, Social Justice and Territories; and
• SCInTE(a)+Democracy - School, Curriculum, Innovation, Teacher Education plus Democracy.

CIIE activities in CoPIns and RGs will be guided by thematic axes that rest on the centre's current inter/national leadership in educational research and intervention, and address significant contemporary challenges and inequalities: (i) Education and democracy, (ii) Equity, inclusion and social justice, (iii) Culture, arts and quality education, (iv) Participation, knowledge sharing, and co-creation, and (v) Just transitions for alternative futures: digital, climatic and societal. CIIE will continue to further research that exposes the social inequalities that pervade educational policies and practices, and advocating for the recognition of rights to access quality formal and non-formal education and the possibility to imagine alternative futures.
For 2025-2029, CIIE continues for further state-of-the-art research that addresses educational and societal challenges while advocating for a just internationalisation - as in the recent collaborative research line on Artificial "Intelligence"; engaging citizens in the co-design of 'societal challenge-driven research' through the collaborative work of two observatories, OBVIE and ODEC, and the recently created LabDERE; sustain an international leadership on the advanced training of young researchers and mentoring of researchers' careers; encourage public, reasoned debate on educational issues; and reinforce its Open Science strategy by publishing open-access outputs and managing two diamond open-access scholarly international publications: Educação, Sociedade & Culturas and Scopus JSSE-Journal of Social Science Education.