Compreender a mudança em educação: Condições, desenvolvimentos e resultados

In recent years, the theme of transforming education has gained great importance. From large international organizations (UN, UNESCO, OECD...) to the multiplication of initiatives, especially technological ones, promoted by the “global education industry”. The PI of this project has dedicated his life to this topic, mainly from three perspectives: a) a historical perspective that has led him, since his first doctoral thesis in 1986, to the study of the New Education and the innovative dynamics of the 60s and 70s (Nóvoa, 1987; Nóvoa, 2020); a comparative perspective, very present in his second doctoral thesis in 2006, around the construction of the “school model” (Nóvoa, 2006); a pedagogical perspective, from schools and teachers, developed in his last two books (Nóvoa, 2023a; Nóvoa & Alvim, 2022). The guiding line of all the reflections is always the teacher, his/her training, pedagogy, and initiatives, especially the collaborative ones (Nóvoa, 2023a). The PI of the project has studied and worked with Michael Huberman, but also with Daniel Hameline, Pierre Dominicé, Pierre Furter and many other educational innovators, without forgetting the collaboration with Paulo Freire, in Geneva and in Brazil. More recently, he has played a prominent role in the UNESCO report on the futures of education (Zewde, Nóvoa, et al., 2021), as well as in the United Nations Transforming Education Summit and in numerous global initiatives. It is on this legacy of several decades of historical, comparative, and pedagogical reflection that this project is being developed. By 1) identifying changing pedagogical practices in Portuguese schools, ChangEDU aims to contribute to a broad movement of identification of what are already good examples of successful local practices, that is, to identify what we want to transport to education in the future. By 2) systematising and theorising change in education, this project aims to contribute to a body of knowledge about how practices change locally, that is, to better understand how we may transform education. And by 3) igniting innovation hubs across the country, the project aims to contribute for the process of educational transformation, in a process that seeks to build upon the synergies created by a participatory theorising of pedagogical changing practices. An exploratory study has already been conducted by the project team, with the aim of mapping out innovative educational initiatives across the country. The Portuguese mainland territory was covered: in each of the 18 districts at least one school was visited, in a total of 41 schools (ANNEX 2). Schools where innovative initiatives are taking place were targeted and visits were directed to establish a first contact with local actors and to conduct informal observations which will allow the team to take decisions as to which initiatives may be constituted into case studies. Five innovative initiatives will be chosen according to the following criteria: 1) territorial dispersion in Portuguese mainland to establish educational change focal points across the country; 2) initiatives must display change of pedagogical practices explicitly focusing on the pedagogical relationships, that is, intense change at the level of teacher-pupil, pupil-pupil and teacher-teacher relationships will be valued; 3) motivation of teachers to collaborate with ChangEDU.