Abstract:

Higher Education (HE) in Portugal, as in the rest of Europe, has undergone major changes in the last two decades, many of them resulting from the Bologna Process that advocates a more student-centred education. This change in approach should also lead to changes in teaching methodologies. However, most teachers were educated in a different paradigm, where teaching methodologies were generally more expositive and teacher-centered.

In Portugal, as in many European countries, it is not necessary to have pedagogical training before starting a teaching career in HE, and therefore most teachers have little or no training in this area. Nevertheless, there is a growing interest in pedagogical training, to overcome some of the gaps identified and to address the need to enrich the range of teaching strategies and methodologies felt by teachers.

In order to analyse how the pedagogical knowledge and training is perceived in Portugal, and taking as a reference the study by Xavier and Leite (2019), who carried out a mapping of the Portuguese public universities that offered pedagogical training to their teaching staff in 2017, a search was carried out of all the Portuguese public Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), both universities and polytechnic institutes, that have developed pedagogical projects and initiatives for their teaching staff. The main objective of this work is to analyse the evolution and current status of pedagogical training in the daily life of Portuguese HEIs.

It was found that there was an increased effort by Portuguese public universities in the creation and development of pedagogical activities, with improvements and an increase in number of activities related to pedagogical training when compared to those referred to in the study by Xavier and Leite (2019). Although it is not possible to verify if there were changes/improvements in the case of polytechnic institutions (because it was not studied by Xavier and Leite), we provide a survey of the current status of pedagogical initiatives for their teaching staff.

An aspect that is considered positive is that several HEIs develop pedagogical training partnerships among themselves (e.g., the “Jornadas Interinstitucionais de Desenvolvimento Pedagógico" or Inter-institutional Seminar on Pedagogical Development). These are initiatives for sharing knowledge, teaching and learning strategies, methodologies and good practices, thus contributing to improve the quality of education, focused on the students.

With this study, it was possible to observe that pedagogical issues are receiving increasing attention from the Portuguese public HEIs, leading to the development of initiatives, activities and projects as part of the HEIs' mission. Despite the increasing attention that this topic is gaining, and similar to what Xavier and Leite found, there are still some HEIs that do not have an history of developing pedagogical activities. Pedagogical training in Portugal is a relatively recent practice, and even though it has positively evolved in recent years, there is still room for it to grow and become a common practice to support teachers in higher education.

Keywords:

Pedagogical training, teacher training, professional development, higher education.