Autonomy and curricular flexibility: pathways and challenges in educational action

• Autor(a) principal: Alves, Sónia
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Madanelo, Olga, Martins, Maria
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.7559/gestaoedesenvolvimento.2019.387

In the last decades, the Portuguese Education System has overcome the challenges of extending compulsory education and reducing early school leaving and academic failure; nevertheless, students still reveal difficulties in applying their knowledge, the socioeconomic context remains determinant in academic success and, furthermore, disengagement and indiscipline issues, together with the predominance of traditional pedagogical methodologies, continue to negatively affect learning. These are the frailties that vindicate the adoption of an educational paradigm focused on the development of competences appropriate to contemporary challenges, in order to prepare citizens with various knowledges, which may sustain intentional and examined action. The Students’ Profile by the End of Compulsory Schooling (PA) ensures the convergence of curriculum organization and management decisions, in the different educational and training courses, defining principles, values and areas of competences to be developed. The Essential Core curriculum identifies the common base and core curriculum all students should learn, as well as the cognitive processes to be activated and the associated know-how; it also suggests strategic educational actions focused on the Students’ Profile competences. With the new curriculum for compulsory education (Decreto-Lei n.º 55/2018, July 6), schools are granted more autonomy in order to make decisions aimed at improving the quality of teaching and learning, enhancing inclusive education, implementing curriculum co-authoring in interdisciplinary management and education for citizenship and development, and integrating evaluation in the curriculum development. Curriculum flexibility aims to guarantee everyone the right to learning and school success, by adjusting the educational action to the specificities of the student and the school, by the interdisciplinary contextualization of knowledge and by promoting active and meaningful learning. In the “Curriculum Autonomy Domains”, the student is the agent of his knowledge construction by action, in differentiated and collaborative learning environments. The formative evaluation assumes a regulatory function of teaching and learning, supporting adaptations, generating feedback on difficulties and potentialities, and promoting students’ self-regulation.