PERSPECTIVES OF EMANCIPATION IN PEDAGOGICAL AND CURRICULAR PRACTICE

between theories and discourses

Abstract

The article presents the results of an investigation on the perspectives of emancipation present in the discourses of professors of the Universities of Minho and Porto, in Portugal. The objective  was to know how teachers work the concept of emancipation and how they do it, in order to identify which perspectives they adopt in their theoretical productions and how they configure them in their pedagogical and curricular practices. This research has a qualitative approach, which initially entailed the bibliographical study on the concept of emancipation and, later, semi-structured interviews as data collection instruments. For the analysis and discussion, there were the theoretical contributions of the fields of philosophy and curriculum, with this philosophical basis the theoretical framework was constituted.  For the interviews, six teachers were selected, according to the following criteria: acting in courses of Education and Technology of Curriculum Development and consolidate emancipation as a guiding element of their pedagogical practice and their theoretical productions. The results showed that, in the interviewees discourse, emancipation is put in perspective as a synonym of critical, reflective and transformative education. It is conceived as a possibility for the critical thinking development and for making changes in individuals – in the sense of Kantian Enlightenment - and therefore as the purpose of education. Analyzed from the theoretical foundation, this emancipation perspective gets close to the approaches of the Frankfurt School Critical Theory, which is also present in the Critical Curricular Theory.