From Design and Policy to Teaching Practice: the case of the Portuguese National Geography Curriculum for Basic Education

Author(s):

Felisbela Martins(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

03. Curriculum Innovation

Format:

Paper

Session Information

03 SES 07 A, Curricular Capacity Building

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

17:15-18:45

Room:

B110 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Jan van den Akker

Contribution

In the early 2000s, the field of education in Portugal experienced significant curriculum changes resulting from the work developed by the Ministry of Education together with several sectors of the educational community. These changes were based on the Process of Participated Reflection on the Curriculum which led to new ways in its conception, giving rise to the National Curriculum for Basic Education (NCBE).

This Curriculum Reorganisation established a NCBE organised around general competences and specific competences for each disciplinary area, presenting suggestions for their development, based on educational experiences to be accomplished by the students. A curriculum had been designed at national level that could be reconceptualised at the local scale.

Now that political discourse has changed again and a national curriculum has been established at national level, understood as a set of contents and aims, implemented on the basis of study plans, programmes, the knowledge, abilities and learning goals that should be achieved in each year of schooling, we think it is essential to understand how the national curriculum and the geography curriculum in particular, which was intended to be reconceptualised at the local level, was reinterpreted in the practices of teachers.

In this study, we have applied the “policy cycle” approach developed by Stephen Ball. In analysing policy in general and educational policy in particular, Stephen Ball defends a “policy cycle” approach as a contribution to understanding the way in which they are produced, what is their purpose, and what are their effects.

Rejecting the notion that policies are implemented, Ball proposes a continuous cycle consisting of three major contexts: the context of influence, the context of text production, and the context of practice. He later expanded this cycle to the contexts of results/effects and the context of political strategy (Ball, 1994). Each of these contexts presents arenas, positions and interest groups and each involves disputes and confrontations (Ball et al., 1992), quite apart from there being complex relations amongst them which are not always apparent.

This approach has been used in different circumstances to research and theorise policies, i.e., as Mainardes (2009) mentions, it is a way of thinking about policy and about how policies are designed.

Taking this approach as a theoretical-methodological reference, we intend to understand how the National Curriculum and that of Geography for Basic Education was designed and implemented, and how it has been (re)interpreted in the practices of teachers, during the 2000s in Portugal. Ball’s “policy cycle” approach offers an analytical framework to focus on the path taken by curriculum policy, since its initial formulation to the practices developed in the school and classroom setting.

The goal is to deepen our insights into how the national and geography curricula were designed, took shape and how they have translated into practice(s), based on this theoretical-methodological framework according to the first three contexts of the “policy cycle”. To this end, we have applied a number of research procedures which enabled us to give voice to several stakeholders who played an active role in the development of Portuguese curriculum policy. We gave voice to politicians, academics, curriculum authors and teachers.

Method

Based on the assumption that it is in the context of influence that public policies arise and discourses are built, we analysed the NCBE and the Geography Curriculum Guidelines (GCG), so as to identify their major guiding principles and the points of convergence between guidelines issued by transnational and intergovernmental organisations and the measures taken by the Portuguese government. Thus, to examine the influences operated on the NC and the geography curriculum until the official documents were published, we conducted extensive documental research, on publications from international and trans-governmental bodies, national legislation, and international papers on geographical education. We also conducted individual, semi-structured interviews, comprising semi-open or flexible questions, with public bodies directly involved in the process and that played key roles in the curriculum review. The next step in this approach, aimed at understanding how the documents produced in Portugal were interpreted in practices, we gave voice to teachers. We interviewed teacher training supervisors with whom we worked and teachers. The intention was to identify their practices and characterise what took place in school settings in terms of reinterpretation by geography teachers of the curriculum as it was specified at national level. A collective interview was held with 7 geography supervisors in the 2008/2009 academic year, and we asked the remaining 6 teachers to keep three class diaries consecutively, on class planning, management and delivery, in a specific geography class. The diaries were written between December 2009 and May 2010. The data and information obtained were organised and analysed, so as to extract meanings related with the research. We then applied content analysis to these data. We read this corpus carefully, letting the verbal expressions and terms sink in, such that they could shed light on the general meaning of key ideas. The next step consisted in categorising them, based on the Vala’s (1986) concept of record units, which allowed us to simplify the material to be analysed and improve the understanding of its meaning. The ideas were categorised according to open procedures (Esteves, 2006), i.e., we departed from empirical data to build a classification that best adapted to the aims to be achieved.

Expected Outcomes

By giving voice to the individuals who were involved in the design of the NCBE, we were able to understand that the political discourse and Portuguese curriculum policy were influenced by projects developed by international agencies such as UNESCO and the OECD, in terms of curriculum design and the role of the school. As for the GCG, they were designed in accordance with the major principles of the NCBE. They were also conceived in such a way as to allow schools and teachers to adapt the curriculum according to local realities and particularly to their students. We interviewed teacher training supervisors. We were able to conclude that, for them, the official, national documents were issued out of nowhere. Confronted with the change, and on the basis of their personal experience, they admitted that they knew very little or nothing at all. For these supervisors, the Curriculum Reorganisation implied significant changes in the organisation of school work and, consequently, in the work of teachers. Others, nevertheless, took the processes stipulated in the curriculum on board, since they could focus on the interpretative aspects of the different educational experiences and the school could adapt the curriculum at the local scale. We also gave voice to the teachers and discovered that they had employed pedagogical modes of work predominantly focused on developing strategies and resources to encourage student participation following a directional/technical approach. But this was not unanimous, since some teachers had followed strategies and resources to encourage students to seek emancipation and free enterprise. That is, the National Curriculum in the early 21st century, in Portugal, seems to have been interpreted as a prescriptive curriculum and was taught the same way at these teachers’ schools, even though it had provided the for the possibility of being adapted at the local scale.

References

BALL, Stephen (1990). Politics and Policy making in education. Explorations in Policy Sociology: Education Reform Act. . New York e London: Routledge. BALL, Stephen, BOWE, Richard, with GOLD, A. (orgs) (1992). Reforming education & changing scholl: cases studies in policy sociology. London/New York: Routledge. BALL, Stephen (1994) Education Reform. A critical and post-strutural approach. Buckingham. Philadelphia: Open University Press BALL, Stephen (1998). “Cidadania Global, consumo e política educacional”, in SILVA, Luís (org.). A escola cidadã no contexto da globalização. Petrópolis: Vozes, pp.121-137. BALL, Stephen, BOWE, Richard (1998). “El currículum nacional y su ‘puesta en práctica’: el papel de los departamentos de materias o asignaturas” in Política educativa y reforma del currículum Revista de estudos do currículo, vol.1, nº 2, pp.105-131. (Documento digitalizado). BALL, Stephen (2001). “Directrizes Políticas Globais e Relações Políticas em Educação” in Currículo sem fronteiras, v.1, n.2, pp. 99-116, Julho/Dez. Disponibilisado em http://www.curriculosemfronteiras.org/ Acesso em: 12 de Dezembro de 2008. BALL, Stephen (2002). “Reformar escolas/reformar professores e os terrores da performatividade” in Revista Portuguesa de educação, 15, n.2, pp. 03-23, Universidade do Minho. BALL, Stephen (2004). “Performatividade, Privatização e o Pós-estado do Bem-Estar” in Educação Sociedade, Vol.25, n.89, pp. 1105-1126, Set./Dez. Texto disponível em http://www.cedes.unicamp.br Acesso em: 12 de Dezembro de 2008. BALL, Stephen, (2006). “Sociologia das políticas educacionais e pesquisa crítico-social: uma revisão pessoal das políticas educacionais e da pesquisa em política educacional” in Currículo sem fronteiras, v.6, n.2, pp. 10-32, Julho/Dez. Disponibilizado em http://www.curriculosemfronteiras.org/ Acesso em 12 de Dezembro de 2008. BALL, Stephen (2008). The education debate. Bristol:The Policy Press. ESTEVES, Manuela (2006). “Análise de conteúdo” in LIMA, Jorge Ávila., PACHECO, José Augusto (org.) (2006) Fazer investigação. Contributos para a elaboração de dissertações e teses. Porto: Porto Editora, Colecção Panorama, pp.105- 126. MAINARDES, Jefferson (2006) “Abordagem do ciclo de políticas: uma contribuição para a análise de políticas educacionais” in Educação Sociedade, vol. 27, nº94, pp. 47-69, Janeiro/Abril. Texto disponível em http://www.cedes.unicamp.br Acesso em: 12 de Dezembro de 2008. MAINARDES, Jefferson, MARCONDES, Maria Inês (2009). “Entrevista com Stephen J. Ball: um diálogo sobre justiça social, pesquisa e política educacional” in Educação Sociedade, Campinas, vol.30,nº 106, pp.303-318, Jan/Abril 2009.Texto disponível em http://www.cedes.unicamp.br Acesso em 22 de Fevereiro de 2011. VALA, Jorge (1986). “Análise de Conteúdo” in SILVA, Augusto Santos, PINTO, José Madureira Metodologia das Ciências Sociais Porto: Edições Afrontamento, Biblioteca das Ciências do Homem, pp.101-128.

Author Information

Felisbela Martins (presenting / submitting)

FLUP

Geography

Porto

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