Session Information
04 SES 06 A, Inclusion and Diversity
Paper Session
Contribution
The Portuguese population in a school strongly branded by youth cultures is going through a process of increasing heterogeneity. This is due to: i) the progressive concretization of mass schooling; ii) the enlargement of compulsory education; iii) the increasing phenomena of migration, as Portugal is currently a country of emigration and immigration.
This paper analyses the possibilities and constraints faced by teachers who have to deal with heterogeneity, while transforming it (or not) into inequalities.
The analysis of these possibilities and constraints takes into account:
- That teachers’ habitus is build within and among several processes of socialization and traditional professional training (Bourdieu, 1970). As he says it, this habitus is build along with contextual circumstances and only mutable under particularly strong conditions. In the current time, mass schooling has been implemented having greater pupil heterogeneity as a result. So, teachers’ professional lives are affected by the former and by public scrutiny over teachers’ work and education, the public devaluation of the teaching profession, as well as a sense of insecurity introduced in teachers’ practice by the evaluation of teacher performance, the increasing concern with pupils’ final exams and the new managerialism of schools. How will these circumstances affect teachers deeper believes and assumptions and the way they deal with pupils heterogeneity is a question underlying this paper.
- Teachers’ possibility (or lack of possibility) to manage their relative autonomy (Fritzell, 1987), within the context referred above, in which this relative autonomy may be difficult to manage. We assume that teachers’ relative autonomy that might allow for more adequate management of heterogeneity, may be put into action in decision making about: the education within citizenship; the pursuit of ambiguously defined “academic excellence” (Cortesão, et al., 2007) through the promotion of learning; the management of explicit and hidden curriculum (Bernstein, 1996); the criteria and processes of hetero and self-evaluation that promote success; the organization of formal and informal social contexts within school; the implementation of social and educational mechanisms to prevent school dropout and exclusion; and so forth.
- The limits that arouse whether from modern society or late modernity macro-structural contexts (Wallerstein, 1990). In the last decades several processes of economic, political, social and cultural reconfiguration, in the globalization dynamics, have occurred within which educational reconfiguration arises. In this context of globalization(s), the changing relations among states, and the changing roles of the states and its institutions it is to be emphasized in what concerns the regulation of education through the production and enactment of educational policies (Barroso, 2006).
Therefore, taking the standing point of a critical perspective, this paper takes into account the current socio-economic conditions and education policies to discuss the “harmonious” conviviality between explicit democratization measures and the processes of discrimination that figure the maintenance of the “controlled management of exclusion” within the school system.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
- Baganha, Maria Ioannis; Peixoto, João (1997) Trends in the 90's: the Portuguese migratory experience in Maria Ioannis Baganha (ed.), Immigration in Southern Europe. Oeiras: Celta Editora, pp. 15-40. - Barroso, João (org) (2006) A Regulação das Políticas Públicas de Educação. Lisboa: Educa. - Bernstein, Basil (1996) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. London: Taylor & Francis. - Bourdieu, Pierre; Passeron, Jean-Claude (1970) La reproduction. Eléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement. Paris: Editions de Minuit. - Cortesão, Luíza; Leite, Carlinda; Madeira, Rosa; Nunes, Rosa; Trindade, Rui (2000) Nos Bastidores da Formação, Contributo para o Conhecimento da Situação Actual da Formação de Adultos para a Diversidade em Portugal. Lisboa: Celta. - Cortesão, Luíza; Stoer, Stephen; Antunes, Fátima; Araújo, Deolinda; Macedo, Eunice; Magalhães, António; Nunes, Rosa; Sá Costa, Alexandra (2007), Girândola de Significados. Polissemia de Excelências em Escolas Portuguesas do Século XXI. Porto: LIVPSIC. - Fritzell, Christer (1987) On the Concept of Relative Autonomy in Educational Theory, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 8 (1), pp. 23-35. - Perrenoud, Philippe (2005) La pédagogie à l'école des différences. Fragments d'une sociologie de l'échec. Paris: ESF. - Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (1999) A Construção multicultural da igualdade e da diferença. Oficinas do CES, 135. Coimbra: Centro de Estudos Sociais. - Wallerstein, Emanuel (1990) Culture as Ideological Battleground of Modern World System, in Featherstong, M., (org.) Global Culture, London, pp. 31-35. - Whyte, William Foote (1993) Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. University of Chicago Press.
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