A Infância e a sua Educação nas Políticas Internacionais, na Investigação Académica e nos Programas de Formação em Portugal

Funding
FCT

 

Reference
POCI/CED/61355/2004 e PPCDT/CED/61355/2004

 

Main researcher
Manuela Ferreira

 

Research team
Cristina Rocha
Isabel Abreu
João Rocha
Maria Emilia Vilarinho
Natália Fernandes Soares
Rosa Madeira

 

Duration
05.09.2005 - 03.06.2009

 

Partner institutions
Departamento de Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Aveiro
Instituto de Educação e Psicologia da Universidade do Minho
Instituto de Estudos da Criança da Universidade do Minho

 

Web | Database
CRIE- Portugal

 
 
Abstract
This project is about research in childhood and education regarding policies, academic production and training programmes divided into three analytical dimensions: i) political orientations of the international organizations; ii) the multiple knowledge produced by the academic research in state universities; iii) the initial teacher training programmes in Early Childhood and Elementary Education.
 
The purposes are the following: i) childhood is a social construction, constituting a universal generation structure; ii) the ways the adult world conceptualises childhood and children objectively interfere with the ways they carry on relationship with it.
 
Each dimension of the project aims at identifying the basis-parameters of this social construction and its social effects on the conception of the educative policies developed for childhood, in Portugal; on the scientific fields which have given priority to the childhood study; and on the models of the initial teacher training in Early Childhood and Elementary Education. The political orientations of the international organizations will be analysed through the documents that present basic indicators of children’s well-being with the purpose of defining policies within the national scope. The analysis of the recent scientific production in the Portuguese state universities, in the last ten years, is justified by the need to systematize and release the multiple knowledge produced there about children and their education (0-10 years) according to the multiple disciplinary fields and the incidental researching areas; identifying there the construction of scientific objects and the corresponding methodologies. The purpose of the analysis of the initial training curricula is to identify and raise questions about the child place and childhood conceptions present there.
 
The conceptions identified in the international document speeches will represent: i) a tool enabling to assess the extension of their interfering or conditioning in the local (re)formulation of the education policies subjacent to the academic research and training contents for Early Childhood and Elementary teachers; ii) a means to critically assess the influence levels of those orientations in the national reality.
 
The bibliographic recension of the academic researches will give deeper enlightenment about: i) the state of the art regarding research into childhood and child education in Portugal; ii) the conceptions which have been privileged in this field and will enable, in an anticipatory perspective, to design new research fields. The critical recension of the initial training programmes, for Early Childhood and Elementary teachers, provided by higher education will contribute to highlight to which extent: i) the international orientations are materialized in the training of those professionals; ii) the leading academic knowledge about childhood and child education are the basis for the curriculum orientations of the analysed training programmes, and a re-conceptualization of the training patterns related to children’s education.