Coordination: Pedro Abrantes; Vice-coordination: Darlinda Moreira

Presentation

The research group Global Education: Connectivity, Complexity and Diversity brings together a group of researchers from various disciplinary areas, dedicated to the study of educational issues from a “glocal” perspective. Through plural theoretical and methodological tools, we seek to implement theories and practices of learning and teaching that prioritize the construction of global democratic identities, while being articulated and thought together with the experiences of everyday life, the relations of belonging and local knowledge.

With the articulated contributions of different social sciences, the consolidation of the scientific analysis and public knowledge about the ways in which educational policies and practices have been developing, on a global scale, through the increasing flows of people, information and capital between different countries and regions of the world is also intended. Thus, one seeks to deepen the study of the global dynamics of domination and exclusion that are reproduced, accentuated, and legitimated through the education and training systems, as well as to promote education and training’s ability to effectively constitute a space for inclusion, citizenship and enhancement of diversity on a global scale, paying particular attention to the Portuguese-speaking countries.

This Research Group understands Global Education from a gaze centered on the complexity of counterpoints and escapes from the great parameters for understanding gestures and educational practices in the world today. The simultaneity of global and local scales, current temporalities, historical roots, and imaginations of the future leads us to the contexts of formal, informal and non-formal education, to cultural and intercultural references, mobility, migration and the respective communication practices for global citizenship, democracy and equality in diversity. It also leads us to the educational reconfigurations of digital implementation, regardless of national borders, both at different educational levels and in different spaces, domestic and community. The concept transversal to such dialectical oppositions resides in the idea of lifelong education and training, in a multimodal manner, crossing the formal with the informal under an ethnographic and sociological look.

Objectives

Following the EU 2030 Agenda and UN agenda’s goals, this Research Group main objective is to develop knowledge and practices of inclusive and reflective academic/scientific research on global education. The specific objectives focus on the theoretical-practical articulation in the study of global education in relation to local appropriations and expressions; the development of participatory methodologies and of narrative and ethnographic analyses attentive to the experiences of the world of the social subjects; the carrying out of research on themes of education in the era of connectivity, between different and unequal worlds capable of bringing together the means and the ends of educational research.

In practice, such objectives will be pursued by junior and senior researchers, from various disciplinary areas, in a context of interdisciplinary and collaborative scientific research, respecting dialogue and co-production of knowledge. This Group will defend its own research practice proposed as a mutual learning laboratory, useful for life in society and healthy coexistence.

Projects and initiatives

• VALUES project – Education for global citizenship among student populations in Europe (re-editing and re-submission).
• “Connectivity and diversity” Project, in the same line of citizen training.
• “GGG: geographies, generations, gender” Project, action-research with theatre on the question of otherness and difference/formation between cultures and generations.
• “International Schools: global citizenship, educational entrepreneurship and neoliberal globalisation” Project.
• “Quality education for all? Education in the 2030 Agenda and its consequences in Portuguese-speaking countries” Project.