Comparative Education in Graduate and Postgraduate Courses Programs in Portugal

• In Event: Teaching Comparative and International Education (CIE): Pedagogical Aspects of CIE and CIE Guiding Pedagogies

Abstract

The privileged field of Comparative Education is the study of the analysis of how the school model has been affirmed and consolidated in different world spaces. The school model developed initially in Europe will become not only universal, but almost the only possible or even imaginable (Nóvoa, 1998). Being a discipline of the Educational Sciences, whose origin goes back to the beginning of century XIX was, nevertheless after World War II that the Comparative Education had a great development and a significant expression in the set of Educational Sciences. It was from this period, with the creation of a vast system of international intergovernmental organizations (ONU, UNESCO, FMI, OECD, World Bank), that there is a strong impulse to the internationalization of educational issues, constituting what Dale (2004) call the Globally Structured Agenda for Education.
The development of Comparative Education in Portugal is the product of a very specific socio-political context. Until the Carnation Revolution, which took place on 25 April 1974, the country lived under a dictatorial political regime, very hostile to the social sciences in general and the Educational Sciences in particular. These domains were absent from university education, except for Pedagogy as instrumental part of teachers’ didactical training. It was only in the second half of the 1970s and, especially in the 1980s, that the Education Sciences emerged as a university scientific field, both as autonomous area and as training support for educators and teachers. In the last decade the Comparative Education has gained, although timidly, a greater expression in Portugal. As explanatory factors of this greater expressiveness we have, on the one hand, the aforementioned change of political regime lived in Portugal until 1974 and, on the other hand, the role that comparative education, through large statistical studies, has assumed in relation to governance policy as an element of the foundation or legitimation of educational policies at national level. The current proposal aims to describe the state of art and the role that comparative education represent in the context of graduate and postgraduate courses programs in Portugal. We will discuss the various pedagogical approaches, theories, themes, and content that structure these courses.

Authors

• Carla Galego, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias

• António Teodoro, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias