01-06-2020
31-12-2022
This proposal aims to continue and deepen the contributions of the study "Development education in public higher education in Portugal: mapping representations and analysing experiences", co-funded by Camões I.P. under the line of support for events and studies (2017 edition), and by FPCEUP.
This study, which will run from October 2018 to May 2020, has the general aim of contributing to the knowledge and consolidation of Development Education in Portuguese public higher education, by mapping representations and analysing experiences in this area. The reasons and rationales that framed this study at the time are still relevant today. On the one hand, education for development, orientated by a global citizenship perspective (hereafter ED/CG), continues to lack investment from the point of view of research and intervention in Portugal, particularly in higher education. On the other hand, the challenges of global development, which emphasise the need for social transformation, particularly through education and in line with what GCED proposes to do, are increasingly pressing. The national political context has been sensitive to these issues, of which the renewed National Development Education Strategy (ENED) 2018-2022, articulated with the main national and international strategic options, is an unequivocal example. The ENED 2018-2022 explicitly calls for the role of higher education in the field of DE/CG, in terms of training, research and the production of educational resources, as well as institutional capacity building in this area.
Based on a large number of interlocutors (students and professionals) and participating institutions, the central conclusions of this study included aspects such as: the perception of a scarce presence of DE/GC in higher education pathways; the significant nature of existing curricular experiences of DE/GC in which these actors have participated; to that extent, the usefulness of disseminating them beyond the education courses (in the broad sense) in which these experiences have mostly taken place; the strategic importance of teacher training to increase contact/access to this education; and, also, the importance of the co-curricular dimension for promoting DE/GC, given the potential for flexibility and adaptation to different areas of training. Analysing co-curricular experiences was therefore left open in this study, as was a more in-depth understanding of institutional contexts, suggesting the importance of continuing qualitative research and in-depth studies.
Based on this evidence, this edition of the study takes the University of Porto as its research context. This is a context that we believe is important to study in greater depth in terms of the purposes of DE/GC, both in terms of continuing research processes and investing in training programmes, and for which there is little information available, suggesting that this is an area that has not yet been disseminated in this institution.
TEDeMoS – Work, Education, Development and Social Movements