In the late twentieth century, beginnings of the XXI century, citizenship education assumed a great importance in the educative European system. In Portugal, the document advisor of the politics for the basic teaching, published by the Ministry of Education in 1998, empathizes the need of the school to take office like a privileged area of education for the citizenship. The publication of the act nº 6/2001 approved the Basic Education Curriculum in citizenship education as a key element of the reorganization and as a structuring axis of the whole National Curriculum. This document defends the educational integration to the citizenship as a transversal and inter disciplinary dimension of the elementary school. In the same line of orientation, the Report of the Basic Knowledge of all citizens in the XXI century, published by the National Council of Education in 2004, considers the Active Citizenship as one of the five basic skills for this century. This Document conceives on citizenship an axiological dimension, identifying the ethics of responsibility as the basis for the formation of the new citizen, able to respond to the demands of the globalized society. The answer to these demands requires adopting new educational practices, embodied skills essential to the integration of young people as critical in changing social and cultural. Having in consideration this philosophy of the educative Portuguese system and to the new demands that she causes, we intended to carry out a PhD project on Ethics of the Responsibility in the Citizenship Education . The aim of this communication present part of a work of collaborative action-research, which includes the draft of PhD and that, is still in development. Paying attention to the vastness of the project, in this communication we restrict ourselves to the presentation of work developed with teachers in the context of the conceptualization of the active citizenship and in the creation of conditions so that the education for the citizenship is understood from a dimension ethics-axiological and integrated across the curriculum. To carry out this objective we organize this communication in the next points: reflections on intrinsic relationship between education, citizenship and ethics of responsibility; contextualization of education for citizenship in the Portuguese curriculum, presenting his reach and limitations; conceptualization of the research-action collaborative and conclusions.

This collaborative action-research is organised in five stages. In each one of these stages were used several sources and instruments of data research which allowed us to acknowledge the school, the teachers, their teaching practices in terms of citizenship education, and to create a plan of contextualized formation in this domain. The major sources were the documental analysis of the Educational School Projects, the Class Curricular Projects and the School’s Regiment. The instruments and procedures used in the data assembling were: attendance records in class meetings, interviews to class directors, questionnaires to teachers, development, monitoring and evaluation of the teacher guidance workshop.The sentences will be the communication steps 5 and 6 of the study, the workshop and the monitoring work of teacher’s respectively.

The realization of this study allows us to understand how much is important the process of collaborative action-research in the professional development of the teachers, highlighting the need that the teachers have of spaces where it is possible to develop the critical reflection about his educative practice. The development of this reflection is important for teachers to establish his role as citizenship educators, identify their potential, their difficulties and their needs for action in this field. This study also led us to understand the importance of integrated curriculum project in the promotion of citizenship education, as structuring and transverse axis of the curriculum, and the development of active citizenship as an ethics of responsibility.