The political emphasis placed on education focused on the labor market, marginalizing the social formation of citizens represents a concern, as it reveals an imbalance in the formation of values of the complete human being. Thus, distancing him/her from the public space and from his role as a citizen at a time when there is a weakening of democracy to levels of concern, which is already reflected, for example, in the results of the elections at a European and International level.

Simultaneously, we witness an increasing frequency of acts of violence, namely acts of terrorism, and the emergence of radical movements, as well as the rising of extremist political parties, which remind us of undemocratic moments of history. We believe that citizenship education (CE) may have a key role to prevent and transform this reality because it can provide both individual and social values. The European Union believes that CE plays a key role in training young people as active, informed and responsible citizens, capable of taking responsibility and contributing to the political process (European Union, 2015, 2017).

We drew our study on several conceptions of citizenship already conceived under an educational perspective by various authors. Thus, Veugelers (2007) in his studies has identified three conceptions of citizenship: a) adaptive citizenship; b) individualistic citizenship and c) critical-democratic citizenship. The author based on his work with teachers, students and parents, has clustered educational objectives into three clusters, to which he associated a citizenship conception and educational practices to their achievement ((Veugelers, 2007; Veugelers & Kat, 2003). Westheimer and Kahne (2004) focused themselves on the education of the good citizen, and presented their conceptions of citizenship, and on what will be the best type of citizen to support an effective democratic society. These authors distinguished three types of citizens, which can identify the following conceptions of citizenship: a) personally responsible citizenship, b) participatory citizenship and c) citizenship oriented to social justice. Eidhof, Dam, Dijkstra and Werfhorst (2016) identified two sets of citizenship objectives, distinguishing between consensual (general) democratic citizenship - composed of goals shared by all, being present in all democratic constitutions - and specific contested citizenship, composed of goals that are disputed therefore not consensual. Briefly, these authors considered that conceptions of personally responsible citizenship, participatory citizenship, adaptive citizenship, individualistic citizenship, and consensual democratic citizenship related to topics such as rights, environment, volunteering, among others, are already being developed in schools. Regarding the conceptions of citizenship related to politics and critical thinking, such as the conception of justice-oriented citizenship, critical-democratic citizenship and contested citizenship, the authors considered that they are not being developed in schools and should be as well. We also consider that the several citizenship conceptions must be developed, particularly the more political and democratic conception of citizenship.

The lack of studies in Portugal on this topic and its scarcity at European level, our study aims to contribute to the increase of the knowledge in this area sharing the idea of the vitality of citizenship and, specifically, citizenship in its most political and democratic aspect, in the curricula, teaching practices and in the specific training of teachers for the CE.

To achieve this goal, we mainly based our data collection on the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (Brese et al., 2011; Köhler et al., 2018) procedures, which compares data from European countries and countries around the World, but Portugal did not participate.Thus, we went to know the Portuguese teachers’ perceptions on citizenship conceptions, CE objectives, about the integration of citizenship in curricula and pedagogical practices and, about their specific training needs, distinguishing academic and vocational courses.

For the data collection and analysis was applied a questionnaire to teachers, to know their perceptions about the concept of citizenship, citizenship education objectives, about the integration of citizenship in curricula, pedagogical practices, and specific training. The same questionnaire was applied to all teachers was launched online using the Limesurvey program. Its construction was based on a previously elaborated matrix, supported by international studies already carried out, such as the IEA: ICCS – International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009 and 2016 (Brese et al., 2011; Köhler et al., 2018), OECD: TALIS – Teaching and Learning International Survey de 2008 (OECD, 2010), and the study “Análise Multinível das Condições Estruturais da Educação para a Cidadania (EC) na Europa: as Políticas Europeias de EC e as Visões de Organizações Não-Governamentais (ONG) no Campo da EC” (Caetano et al., 2012). The structure of the questionnaire consists of six parts. The first part, the Characterization, collected the sociodemographic data. The second part, the School Characterization, collected data on the participation of teachers and students in the school's activities. The third part, Citizenship, collected data on the attitudes of teachers about citizenship, in its behavioral component. The fourth part, Citizenship Education, collected data on perceptions about the objectives of citizenship education. The fifth part, Curricula and practices, collected data on perceptions about the curricular strategies of citizenship education, its contents, class planning, sources for teaching citizenship. Finally, the sixth part, the Specific training, collected data on perceptions about the preparation of teachers to work on the different topics of citizenship and on their opinion on how to improve citizenship education, including through specific training. For the sample, the Regions of Coimbra and Douro and Trás-os-Montes were selected by convenience. The approach used for the selection of lower-secondary schools and teachers, within each region, was the Stratified Two-Stage Cluster Sample Design. In the first stage of the sampling process, a random sample of 15 schools in the Region of Coimbra (from a total of 31 schools) was selected and 14 schools in the Douro and Trás-os-Montes region were included. During the second phase, a fixed number of 20 target teachers were randomly selected and weighted in each school, considering the type of teaching in which they teach and whether they are, or were citizenship teachers. A total of 549 teachers were selected.

Overall, the results allowed us to conclude that, in general, teachers of the lower-secondary Portuguese public schools consider that citizenship actions that were presented to them are quite important or very important and that there are topics where they feel more comfortable to teach than others. However, we noticed a tendency for teachers to value less citizenship actions related to politics and critical thinking. This trend is also observed in the topics where they feel more and less prepared to teach. Most of the teachers reported that they do not feel very well prepared on any of the citizenship topics. However, most consider themselves to be well prepared to teach topics such as human rights, environment and sustainability, equal opportunities between men and women, and citizens' rights and responsibilities. Teachers feel less prepared to teach topics about the Constitution and political parties, the global community and international organizations and emigration and immigration. Among the results we also highlight that most teachers consider that the best curriculum strategy for citizenship education is the cross-sectional strategy. Regarding the content, most teachers attach greater importance to content from original sources such as Constitutions, Declaration of Human Rights, among other similar documents, and content stemming from official curricula, guiding or structural curriculum lines. The results trend meets the results of other European studies, which identify the conception of more critical and democratic citizenship as the least valued and less developed. Thus, we too reinforce the idea of the need to develop the various conceptions of citizenship, namely the most critical and democratic aspect. In this way, we are contributing to the balanced formation of the human being in a complete way, both with individualistic and social values, preparing the citizen to actively participate in a democratic environment.

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