A escola e as diferenças

: os cursos de educação e formação

Abstract

Over the last decades, access of all young people to education and the extension of basic education have posed new questions to school, challenging the education system to respond effectively to the problems brought about by the students’ socio-cultural heterogeneity. Compulsory education has uncovered aspects which reveal that, although school rhetorically claims to be for all, the use of the resources it provides is in fact unequal. Students come from different backgrounds and the functioning of school, the curricula, the responses given to students’ needs and pedagogical practices, among other mechanisms, tend to accentuate those initial differences. The implementation of educational measures to fight against failure, school dropout and the entry of unqualified young people into the labour market implies the coexistence in the same school of different modalities with different symbolic value which hinder the realization of the principles of equal opportunities to access and use of educational resources. In this research we studied Education and Training Courses (Cursos de Educação e Formação - CEF), a modality which is exclusively intended for specific school student population categories. Our aim was to understand the way school organizes itself to build this type of course, assessing the gap between what is prescribed by education policies and the real outcomes in a school located in a rural area of an interior northern municipality.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Joaquim Machado (Supervisor)