Our conception of school has been rebuilt, during our academic career, in a dynamic process, considering the interpretation of different experiences, shared observations and opinions of many others with whom we shared our journey. The archetype of school we learned, as students, that was anchored in a transmissible perspective gave way, gradually, to a new conception of pedagogical school organization, based on the perspective of school construction. Our work grew its foundations in a school that values the autonomy of the students, their participation in the construction of knowledge and their development as a person. By believing that the school, as an organization, is a living organism, a place to emphasize social relations, characterized by scales of authority, normative orders that promote ties of belonging, leading to identity constructions in favor of common values, we wanted to make ourselves educators, meaning professionals of relationships. We were convinced that our job satisfaction was inseparable from our self-construction as persons. We grew professionally in different kindergartens, where we created bonds of cooperation, complement and cooperative skills with colleagues, operational assistants, parents and guardians, among others. From this, dynamics of interaction, vertically and horizontally, have developed. It has also contributed to a greater awareness of the professionalism, the constant focus on personnel training, experience sharing and divulgation of our pedagogical practices. The need to deepen our knowledge and acquire new skills led us to invest in training. This, allied to the activities, to the dynamics we created with different educational actors in the establishments where we exercise our professional activity, has allowed the participation and development of collaborative dynamics, in a reflected training process. Successive alterations in educational policies required us to develop strategies and mechanisms that facilitate better adaptation to changes. From small school units, the kindergartens, dependent on school delegation, often geographically isolated, they became part of a school group, a larger community. These changes demanded a greater reflection on our practices and the integration in the intermediate management organizations has materialized the opportunity to make known our work as educators. The conflicts inherent to the performance of functions, in the different positions that we were assigned, promoted the deepening of our knowledge and sharing with teachers of other levels of education gave a greater visibility to preschool education and to its importance in the children development. The way how we perceived the curriculum led us to perform flexible curricular lesson plans, owing to the awareness that the teaching and didactic aspects complement each other, valuing the learning process, whether being the result of intended and explicit purposes or if they arouse from the multiple experiences that the child is subjected to. The curricula developed with different groups, based on pedagogy project, appealed to the values of citizenship, critical thinking, responsibility, ability to apply the knowledge acquired to solve problems and to participate in decision making. The absence of a superiorly defined program contributed to the relying in the creativity of children and of each one of us, encouraging diversity of activities, knowledge and experiments. These experiments, the urgency to promote educational continuity between the levels of education and our own need to share knowledge, experiences and enrich ourselves professionally, drove us to create bridges of understanding with families and with 1st Cycle Basic Education. When articulating with the families, recognizing that belongs to them the first role in educating children, we shared knowledge and experiences, incorporating in the curriculum the values and family and community culture, triggering mechanisms of parental involvement to support the educational success of children. Believing in the importance of educational continuity and sequence, while facilitating mechanisms of transition from education level, we developed projects that, in a healthy living, promoted the sharing of knowledge, experiences and physical spaces, between children from different sectors of education. We feel the curriculum as a journey, a path that runs through each of us, on a personal quest for fulfillment of their aspirations. On the way that we traces to build ourselves as persons, each wight interacts with other, in a giving that is actually receiving, sharing experiences and knowledge, resulting from expected or unexpected situations that require constant redefinitions in the originally designed trajectory of our projects. We believe that each child is a project of future, a source of potentials. Thus, our way of "being educated and educating" bases our educational practice in work with children and their families, in constant share with colleagues and other educative community.
| Date of Award | 2012 |
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| Original language | Portuguese |
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| Awarding Institution | - Universidade Católica Portuguesa
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| Supervisor | Célia Ribeiro (Supervisor) |
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