The University of Porto, through a researchers team from the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education of the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, integrates an European project named «Xeno-Tolerance: Supporting VET teachers and trainers to prevent radicalisations». The project main goal is to equip/train teachers to prevent radicalisation among learners, as «first liners» professionals who contact directly with young people in marginalisation, with the support from theoretical tools and practical resources to work at the levels of prevention, detection and/or reaction towards attitudes of discrimination and xenophobia, which can lead to radicalisation.

The concept of radicalisation started to have prominence in public texts about terrorism, in the turn of the year 2005 (Hörnqvist & Flyghed, 2012: 319), and «is usually understood as a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social or religious ideals and aspiration that reject or undermine the status quo”» (Wilner & Dubouloz, 2009 cit inSieckelinck, Kaulingfreks & De Winter, 2015: 330[1]).

Considering Portuguese social, and cultural, reality the radicalisation concept is here assumed as being related with the construction of personal identity, which might be influenced by vulnerable contexts that potentiate the exclusion of fragile social and economic groups. That is why we want to pose the following question: «Can we think that radicalisation is an election of the society we live? (Hörnqvist & Flyghed, 2012: 320).

In the other hand we also believe that is important to consider, under the school context, the acknowledgement and awareness about diversity, and how is important to understand different cultural meanings (Cortesão & Cuale, 2011).

Is under this framework of ideas that this research is located. It constitutes an empirical clipping from the Xeno Tolerance project, supported  by  data that we collect about the vision of a group of teachers who work on the front line, with students who are at the end of that line in terms of their educational trajectory. We assumed that the needs pointed out by teachers could be seen as factors that can conduct to radicalisations processes in its wider conceptualisation, that is why was important to hear from them.

Specifically, the objetives of this reserche are: i) to to identify the difficulties teachers face in their daily work; as well as ii) to characterize ways to overcome those difficulties according to the hard publics they work with; and iii) to identify strategies focusing on how they organise a pedagogical and alternative answer to these considered marginalised students. We believe that this constitutes a new possibility of reconciliation of students with the school through adapted pedagogical models of vocational/professional education, as the key for their “lifelong learning” (Misra, 2011) as well as a strategy to build with them a personal, safe and respectful way of live. In this way we believe it will be also possible, through school, to prevent the risk of these students fall in radicalisation paths.

[1] See also Gad (2012); Githens-Mazer (2012); San; Sieckelinck & Winter (2013); Sewell e Hulusi (2016); Kundnani (2016).

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