Abstract

In Portugal, as at international level, the issue of the territorialisation of education policies has emerged in the last decade as a structural and consensual issue. This ‘consensus’ conceals very diverse and contradictory visions and practices. The main divide is between a managerial logic (which has characterised reform policies) and a democratising logic (characteristic of innovation processes, which tend to go beyond the school form). The relationship between education and the local is marked in the first case by a logic of exteriority and in the second by a logic of interpellation. This project aims to provide insight into the policies and practices of territorialisation of educational action that have taken place over the last decade in Portugal by contrasting these two types of logic.

From an empirical point of view, three levels of analysis will be favoured: a macro level that will focus on discourses and policies (documentary analysis), a meso level that will focus on local educational regulation processes (case studies) and a micro level, by getting to know the points of view of educational actors (questionnaires and geographical approaches). The so-called ‘difficult’ public spaces will be favoured as sites for empirical information gathering, as they are considered more relevant analysers of the mechanisms of ‘alienation’ (and their possible overcoming) from school work that mark the current ‘school crisis’ (rural world, degraded urban neighbourhoods, ethnic minorities). This ‘alienation’, common to both pupils and teachers, configures a relationship with school work that is experienced as extrinsic to the subjects, who have no control over the aims, organisational methods and products of their work.

This research project will link the issue of educational territorialisation with three essential dimensions: the changes in the world of work which refer to the problem of social exclusion, the changes at the level of the state which refer to the crisis of articulation between the education system and the nation-state, within the framework of the more general crisis of the compromise between capitalism and democracy, embodied in the welfare state, the crisis of the instances of normative socialisation refer to the problem of the construction of the experience of the actors, based on the combination, in context, of different logics of action.

In order to understand the processes of educational territorialisation, these phenomena need to be placed within the framework of the changes that the school institution has undergone over the course of the century, which can be summarised in a brief formula: we have gone from a school of certainties (the school as a ‘citizen factory’) to a school of promises (mass schooling) and finally to a school of uncertainties (concomitant increase in schooling with the devaluation of diplomas and the increasing rarity of jobs). The transition from promises to uncertainties constitutes a crisis for the school institution which, within the framework of this project, is diagnosed not as a crisis of effectiveness, but as a crisis of legitimacy.

Funding

FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
POCTI/CED/35554/1999

Partners

EDUCA - Associação de Estudos e Publicações em Educação da FPCE/UL EDUCA Portugal Ensino Superior
ADEF - Associação de Desenvolvimento e Formação Portugal
Direcção Geral dos Assuntos Consulares e Comunidades Portuguesas
CIIE/ Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto - FPCEUP