Abstract:

Having as a reference international policies which point out to school education as a preparation for the experience of living in a digital society, the chosen research objective is to analyse the role ICT plays in Initial Teacher Training (ITT) in Basic Education (BE) in Portugal, to what extent it is influenced (Ball, 1998, 2001; Bowe, Ball & Gold, 1992) by those international policies and how they are re-contextualized (Bernstein, 1993, 1998).

In this sense, the article addresses the following questions: What does the Global Agenda propose about ICT in ITT? What influences do these policies have in the ITT in BE? How are they implemented at the local level?

The study corresponds to a case study (Stake, 2009; Yin, 1994) based on a qualitative paradigm (Taylor & Bogdan, 1987; Denzin & Lincoln, 2003). Resorting to Dale’s (2004) perspective, who sustains that local policies are adapted versions of other worldwide policies, and accepting that these processes occur in conjunction of influences and interdependencies of multiple connections between global, remote and local (Ball, 2001), data was collected by semi-structured interviews with teachers of a public institution of teacher training and also by document analysis (Bowen, 2009; Corbin & Strauss, 2008).

The discourse analysis of the interviews and the analysis of guiding documents of European and Portuguese education policies linked to ITT and ICT showed that although ICT play a major role in international political discourses, particularly as far as school education is concerned, its presence in the BE ITT plans in Portugal is insufficient, being the policies that govern the structure of ITT arising from the Bologna process the main obstacle to their inclusion as a training component.

Keywords:

Educational policies, ICT, Initial Teacher Training, basic education.