Since 2022, the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences (FFCS) of the Portuguese Catholic University (UCP) - Braga has been participating in the TESTEd project, "Towards a European Syllabus in Teacher Education - Facing future challenges together". Funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus + Teacher Academies Program, this project is promoted by five European universities, namely UCP, the Universities of Ruhr Bochum/Akademie RUB (Germany), Oulu (Finland), Cork (UCC-Ireland) and Seville (USE-Spain).
Thus, TESTEd aims to take an international perspective on transversal and socially relevant themes for teacher training, both in initial and in-service training.
The cross-cutting objective of the project is to develop a European syllabus for teacher training, based on academic and non-academic contributions from schools, universities, governmental and non-governmental organizations, which will address five broad and cross-cutting issues:
- Education for Sustainable Development (ESD);
- Democratic Education and Active Citizenship;
- Diversity and Gender Equality;
- Multilingual and Cultural Diversity;
- Digitalization of Learning Spaces.
Based on these elements, various academic and scientific events and activities, always of an international nature, will take place until mid-2025. To this end, a student exchange program funded at €1,650 was organized by the Spanish team of the TESTEd project and involved the five partner countries. In the case of the Portuguese team, it hosted a student from Spain and a student from Finland.
Under the direct guidance of Professor Paulo Dias and other FFCS professors, together with the collaboration of researcher Raquel Rodrigues, the students in question carried out research focused on the university context with two fundamental objectives: to carry out a systematic review on the effect of the service-learning activity methodology in promoting active citizenship among university students, in the case of the Spanish student; and to collect the perceptions of students from Portuguese-speaking countries on the decolonization of the curriculum, with a comparison with other university students from Finland, in the case of the Finnish student.
In this way, there have been months of dialogic work and sharing of experiences that, to a large extent, represent the academic spirit of the FFCS and the international scope of the TESTEd Project.
Exchange Program | 2nd edition
This exchange program will have its 2nd edition in the 2024/2025 school year, so the TESTEd team is already taking the next steps. For information on all the project's activities, you can consult the project's official website or its official Instagram account (@testednetwork).
Specific questions can be answered directly with the Portuguese team:
- Paulo Dias - pdias@ucp.pt
- Raquel Rodrigues – rrmonteiro@ucp.pt