TUTORING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AVEIRO (PORTUGAL): BETWEEN ADOPTING, ADAPTING AND CREATING A TUTORIAL PROGRAMME TO THE "BACHELOR IN BASIC EDUCATION" DEGREE

Tutoring is an activity with almost no tradition in Portugal, either in Higher Education (HE) or in any other educational context. In these past few years, though, some tutoring projects have been emerging, namely in HE institutions, in an attempt to tackle the consequences of HE massification, namely students' diversity and (consequent) difficulties. Today, these initiatives are under public eye due to the Bologna Process, in particular the recommendations related to the implementation of student support and quality assurance programmes.
The University of Aveiro (UA) is, in this matter, no different from other institutions, and its interest towards tutoring gained a certain dimension since the introduction, at the Bologna curricula, of a “tutorial orientation” component.
At the Department of Education the concern towards student support and quality assurance is particularly high because teacher education programmes suffered a great deal of structure and content change in order to accommodate to the Bologna two-cycle model. In this context, a tutorial programme was considered to be a potentially helpful resource to help students understand and adapt to this new teacher education programmes. Considering that the adoption of a pre-existing tutorial model was not possible due to the lack of experiences in Portuguese context and the specific conditions and constraints of our institution, in general, and of teacher education programmes in particular, we faced ourselves with the need to re-invent tutoring and to create a somewhat hybrid and innovative model that conjugates different actors, roles, contents, contexts and activities.
Thus, in this presentation we will briefly address the notion of “tutoring” and the common characteristics found between different models/systems that supported our options. Afterwards, we will explain the adaptations made in order to design a tutorial programme adequate to our needs and to the aims of the programme of “Bachelor in Basic Education”. Finally, we will present and discuss some results of the implementation of our programme and address the possibility of extend it to other 1st cycle Programmes at the UA.