STUDENT’ S ENGAGEMENT IN SCHOOL: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Students’ Engagement in School has been the focus of debate concerning academic success and school dropout, and pointed out as a mean to address the problems affecting our schools and their students, not only for having value in itself, but also for being an important mediator between several academic variables. This paper reviews the research and literature on this concept and its relations with personal and contextual variables, as well as with academic performance, with the aim of summarizing the main relationships found. Literature presents a significant number of studies which sustain that personal variables, such as self-efficacy and self-concept, as well as contextual - peers, school, family- are related with school engagement. The adoption of mastery goals, for instance, has a positive impact on school, as they are related with the use of cognitive and self-regulatory strategies by students. Positive relationships with peers, teachers support and the quality of family relations are associated with higher levels of engagement and academic performance, while negative experiences, such as bullying, are related with educational difficulties. Following this, we reflect about the relevance of studying engagement in school, in the context of widespread financial crisis, and emphasize the need to rethink educational institutions considering the paradigmatic changes that currently occur.

Learning from within: on students, olives and ethnographic knowledge

The chapter elicits the experience of teaching “Ethnography and Tourism” to undergraduate students at the University of Evora. Our main focus of research and teaching has been directed towards teaching exploratory ethnographic methods in order to promote an understanding of the material and immaterial dimensions of the cultural contexts of the region and beyond. Secondly, and, at the same time, we also learn ethnography by reading and discussing comparative research of other ethnographies of tourism spaces, eliciting, among the students, the ethical problems raised by the consequences of tourism in peoples’ cultural settings.