01-09-2002


01-09-2006


In recent years, secondary education has become increasingly important in our society. The educational reforms that have been taking place in this area have sought to build the identity of this level of education.
However, this process of identity construction is crossed by a series of divides between different perspectives, namely between those which, on the one hand, place secondary education as an extension of basic education and, on the other, those which place it in a subordinate position to higher education and/or the world of work.
These divides, which reflect different ways of defining secondary education as a common good, have been complicated by the development of a process of student protest, where what seems to be at stake is the tension between the figure of the young person and the figure of the student, a tension that takes on new contours as pupilisation is applied to increasingly heterogeneous school groups.
This project aims to make intelligible the way in which the logics that intersect in defining this conflict are produced.
From an empirical point of view, two levels of analysis will be favoured:
a macro level which will be concerned with the texts produced at the level of the political decision on secondary education reforms (documentary analysis) and a micro level, where a set of case studies will be favoured, developed in specific spaces (EB 2/3 schools, secondary schools and the first years of university education) with the aim of promoting a dialogue between the meaning that the political field attributes to young people's school work and the confrontation with the latter's sense of the world of life.
With the aim of helping to ensure that the debate on secondary education is not reduced to a reflection that combines the different tensions mentioned above and the crisis of the school institution, the research project will seek to pay greater attention to the experiences of the different publics who live in secondary schools, contrasting them with the strengthening tendencies towards the hyper-scholarisation of educational problems that conceal the crisis of the educating state. In order to understand the processes of building secondary schools in Portugal, it is necessary to situate the logic of the educational reforms within the framework of the changes brought about in the school's social order following the transformations resulting from the widening of its social recruitment base and its difficulties in ensuring the stabilisation of the transition process from the youth to the adult stage.


 


Members Project: 



  • José Alberto de Azevedo e Vasconcelos Correia

  • Manuel Santos e Matos

  • Natércia Alves Pacheco


FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
POCTI/CED/39292/2001


Henrique Vaz

Sofia Marques da Silva


CIIE/Faculdade de Psicologia e Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto - FPCEUP

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