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The fourth biannual meeting of the Euridice project took place on September 3, 4, and 5 at the Slovak Office for Research and Development in Brussels.

Researchers Elsa Estrela, Leanete Thomas Dotta, Lucimar Dantas, Vanessa Russo, and André Freitas took part in the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), held in Belgrade, Serbia.

Teresa Teixeira Lopo, researcher at CeiED, co-director of OP.Edu –  Observatory for Education and Training Policies, and Assistant Professor at Lusófona University – University Centre of Lisbon, has completed her postdoctoral studies at Paris-Saclay University.

Within the 2024 Call for Exploratory Research Projects in All Scientific Domains, promoted by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), eight projects were funded in the Education Sciences panel. Among these, two are coordinated by the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Education and Development (CeiED) of Lusófona University.

The project entitled “Rupture, Popular Power and Emancipation? The Participation of University Students in Literacy Movements (1974–1976)”, led by Teresa Lopo, achieved first place in the Education Sciences panel, with a score of 8.49 points.

The second funded project, entitled “The Power of Protest: The April Revolution and the Construction of the Portuguese Teachers’ Trade Union Movement (1974–1979)”, coordinated by António Teodoro, Director of CeiED, will examine the role of teachers and the emergence of teachers’ unionism in the context of the April Revolution.

These results represent an important recognition of the quality of the research carried out at CeiED and of its contribution to the study of the history of education in Portugal, particularly in the post–April Revolution period.

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Children in elementary schools located in municipalities crossed by the Carajás Railway Corridor, in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, are advancing from grade to grade without acquiring the basic knowledge required. This finding is the starting point of the Doctoral Thesis in Education by Altemar Lima, defended on July 1 at Lusófona University in Lisbon. The central question guiding the research is: what explains school failure in the Carajás Railway Corridor?

This mixed-methods, exploratory study focused on the Railway Corridor in Maranhão. Supervised by Manuel Tavares, its aim was to uncover the causes of school failure from the perspective of the Municipal Education Leaders, the main subjects of the research. The study is grounded in the sociology of education, drawing on historical-dialectical materialism, Southern epistemologies, and, complementarily, world-systems theory.

The author defines “excluding inclusion” as the educational model that universalizes access to public elementary schools but denies popular classes the mastery of socially legitimized knowledge through promotion without proficiency. Automatic progression is understood as a form of selectivity that conceals school failure. While it promotes access, it does not guarantee learning. National assessments, such as SAEB, end up being instrumentalized by local political interests, masking reality and compromising the future of many students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The thesis highlights that socioeconomic factors such as child labor, unemployment, hunger, and other adversities directly affect student performance and learning. Drawing on decolonial theory and world-systems analysis, it examines how public schools in the Railway Corridor contribute to the reproduction of social inequalities, while denouncing the mining-export enclave as a driver of exclusion.

The study identifies three dimensions of school failure:

• Sociological: the historical exclusion from access to education;
• Epistemological: the delegitimization of indigenous and local knowledge;
• Pedagogical: uncritical and decontextualized education.

Inspired by authors such as Paulo Freire, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Wallerstein, Quijano, Manuel Tavares, António Teodoro, Ana Benavente, and Jessé Souza, among others, Altemar Lima argues for a decolonial education that values local knowledge, confronts structural racism, and challenges the logic of reproducing social inequalities.

In addition to exposing school failure along the Carajás Railway Corridor, the thesis calls for reigniting the debate on this persistent problem and its new manifestations, both in academic circles and within schools.

The work serves as both a warning and an invitation to reflection: school failure, though rarely discussed, remains a scar on education offered to disadvantaged groups. It is “an old issue and a new problem”, hidden by high promotion rates but revealed through low proficiency levels.

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CeiED researcher João Filipe Matos has been formally invited to join the Strategic Council of SAPIEN – South and Atlantic Pedagogical Innovation & Excellence Network, a Centre of Excellence led by NOVA University Lisbon.