Rosa Serradas Duarte; Maria Manuel Calvet Ricardo & Maria de Lurdes Silva (org.)

Authors, Editors

2013

Year of edition

978-989-851-257-4

ISBN

Synopsis – [Paths of Teacher Associationism and Unionism in Portugal 1890-1990]. 

The way in which, in 1974, the right to citizenship was conquered and the process of professionalization of teaching began still marks indelibly today the professional culture of teachers and how they relate to education administration and educational partners. 

Many of these issues are debated and explored in depth in this book, the result of a research project developed within the scope of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Education and Development (CeiED), funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), initially under the responsibility of Rogério Fernandes, mentor of many generations of researchers and a friend who left us prematurely, and later by Rosa Serradas Duarte, herself a prominent unionist for three decades, who led the project with sensitivity and determination to its completion.

The work produced by the team constitutes an important contribution to the understanding of the teaching profession and the collective action of teachers in Portugal. Many issues remain to be addressed, and new research questions are raised for future projects. 

Teachers (and education) are experiencing difficult times, the result of a set of conjunctural and structural problems affecting contemporary societies, with particular emphasis in Europe. The definition of new utopias for political action in the field of education and training, the construction of new educational projects for human emancipation, the renewal of teachers' pedagogical practices in the search for a delicate balance between the struggle for equality and respect for difference, requires an in-depth knowledge of teachers' thinking, how they construct their identities, and how they act individually and collectively. And this will surely be a field of future research.