The current investigation is based on a discussion of the schooling effects throughout students’ lives. It is now integrated into IJUP program (Young Investigation at University of Porto), but its origins set back to the Observatory of Life in Schools (OBVIE), which is part of the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education (CIIE) of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences from University of Porto (UP). The research aims at understanding how the experiences brokered by the school, as an institution, modify the lives of students, in case they actually have any effects. The research is intended to comprehend through the students’ voice (Flutter and Rudduck, 2004) how school contributes to the development of diverse dimensions in each student life, in a search to identify the senses and meanings that these students address to school and the experiences they live within it. Historically, the tasks of developing new institutional policies and practices have ignored one of the most important voices from the educational field, the students’ (Pereira, 2009). Although there was a movement in England by the 1970s trying to privilege what students had to say about education, it was not before the 1990s that the epistemology of student’s voice grew stronger in academic research (Teixeira and Flores, 2010).  By now, we have acknowledged the conviction on this perspective called the students voice, from which we evaluate schooling experiences from the point of view of a first person actor, students themselves (Clark and Moss, 2001; Tangen, 2008). This epistemology, then, presents itself not only as an ethical choice, but also as a mean to enhance democracy at schools. Therefore, it is from a dialogue that privileges issues related to the schooling effects that the project attempts to interpret how the schooling and its experiences interfere in the growing of its subjects and how much they interfere on the way they relate to the world, the expectations they have regarding their future and the subjectivities they create and carry on during life spam (Charlot, 1999; Rayou, 2000). The comprehension of the inquired students on their own scholar trajectories make up the path we, as investigators, decided to focus on in this project in order to develop an analysis of schooling phenomena. Education meanings are limited by the time and place in which it is settled and produced, therefore, it assumes diverse local, social and historical contexts, elements from which it cannot be analyzed apart (Amado and Boavida, 2006)). Facing transformations implied into new identity configurations and placed into new economic and sociocultural conditions, which are the result of the current social context, it is important to realize how the everyday life of schools, children and young people, teachers and families is affected in a way that the scholar practices and policies become unstable. Instability, then, is the landmark to assume the necessity for new institutional terms that take into consideration the dimensions of educational relationships, scholar knowledge, institutional organization and education social field.

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