Authentic leadership in school organizations

This research study, descriptive and exploratory in nature, had as objectives to know the perceptions of the teacher/students of a graduation course in Educational Sciences about their leaders, measured and evaluated through the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) and to verify if existed differences between the public and private school organizations in the four characteristics defined for the ALQ: a) self-conscious; b) transparency; c) moral/ethics; d) balanced processing. A non-probabilistic sample by convenience consisted of 86 participants from Brazil. The results of this research study show that the level of authenticity of the leader, in the four characteristics defined for the ALQ, in the perception of the subjects inquired, is above of the moderate level. Having in account the type of school organization (public or private), the differences found in the levels of the four characteristics defined for the ALQ were not statistically significant even though, the leaders of the private schools demonstrated to possess slightly higher values in the four analysed sub areas.

Teacher education in Portugal: analysing changes using ATEE-RDC19 scenario methodology

This paper presents an overview of the development of teacher education in Portugal since the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which brought the country to democracy. Making use of the scenario model created by the ATEE-RDC19, it is an attempt to make clearer the hidden philosophies underlying the changes that are undertaken and show how teacher education has evolved from a romantic and idealistic social vision towards an ideology dictated by economic and selfish interests.

Portugal: manifest for the republic education or teacher education under scrutiny

Starting from the analysis of a Manifest placed in the World Wide Web in order to gather signatures, the paper discusses the arousal of a wide spread movement of scepticism in the so called Portuguese “civil socie ty” against the overall result of almost forty years of uninterrupted educational reform that has taken place in Portugal since the late sixties and has lead to an increasing percentage of illiteracy and innumeracy. That Manifest is presented as part of a broader movement, deeply rooted in the Portuguese society, and silent so far, which is becoming stronger and has now strength enough to be part of the political agenda. It is also our concern to unveil an emerging trend of blaming sciences of education and badly trained teachers as responsible for the poor outcome of our schooling system.