Sá de Miranda, Braga, Portugal: Theme projects

Pedagogy for Autonomy and Educational Success – What Relation? An Ongoing Multi-disciplinary School Project

Project initiated in 2007/08 with a group of teachers from different disciplinary areas, whose main aim is to foster learner autonomy as one means to achieve educational success.


MAIN ASSUMPTIONS:
* Educational success depends on the development of competences (knowledge, abilities, attitudes and values).
* Educational success depends on the students’ active involvement in the teaching/learning process.
* Autonomy development requires a learner/learning-centred approach.
* Pedagogy for autonomy entails reflexive, potientially empowering teaching practices.


OBJECTIVES
* Promote coherence of practices, with reference to global curricular goals.
* Promote the integrated development of the learners’ academic and learning competences.
* Promote professional dialogue and peer collaboration.


SUSTAINABILITY FACTORS AND EFFECTIVE CHANGE
* Interest, commitment, participants’ engagement
* Critical attitude towards practice.
* Recognition of the relevance of the project as a collective initiative.
* Institutional support to the project.
* Teacher development on pedagogy for autonomy.
* role of contexts, learners and teachers
* pedagogical principles


ACTIVITIES
* Project team meetings.
* Materials design.
* Pedagogical experimentation.
* Project evaluation at the end of each school year (questionnaire).
* Dissemination of the work done.
* In the school (open sessions/seminars).
* At national and international conferences.
* Publications.

* Latest articles:
Barbosa, I., Kao, S. H., & Lacey, F. (2013). Teaching for autonomy – challenges and possibilities. In A. Barfiel & N. Delgado Alvarado (Eds.), Autonomy in Language Learning: Stories of Practices [Kindle]. Canterbury, England: IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG.

Barbosa, I., Pereira, C. & Branco, C. (2016). Espelho meu, espelho meu… Imagens das Práticas nos Ensinos Básico e Secundário. In Revista de Estudios e Investigación en Psicología Educación, Vol. 3, núm. 1 (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.17979/reipe.2016.3.1

Sá Voluntário

Be a volunteer!
Being a citizen…
It all started in an attempt to enhance the feeling of a responsible citizenship among our students, hand in hand with the acquisition of further academic qualifications.
In order to achieve this goal and privilege a close contact with the surrounding community, our school established a partnership with a local institution – the Parish of S. Vicente. Some of the activities already put into practice included having students socialising with groups of elderly users of the Day Care Centre, helping in the social store and participating in campaigns to gather hygienic products for the parishioners.

All these activities are performed by volunteers – students from the 11th and 12th forms - who want to give their free time another meaning and use it to promote the welfare and better quality of life among the local community members.
The Parish is responsible for the project and for previous volunteering training.
Simultaneously, the school is fully committed in a real integration of intermediate level students with special learning needs, aged 11 to 14, by promoting, not only leisure activities specially planned to include this particular group of students, but also tutorial teaching activities performed by older students.
Those students who feel like embracing this experience just have to get in touch with the school teachers responsible for the project “Sá Voluntário” Dra Maria Eugénia Fernandes and Dra Maria do Carmo Vila-Chã and Make a Difference!

Project “Sá Solidário”

The project aims to involve all the agents of our educational community by sensitising them to donate products that will hopefully help needy community members overcome the lack of basic goods.
A group of teachers and students, in close cooperation with the Students’ Support Office (GAA) is asked to try to identify and select, among all students, those whose families show evidence of facing a difficult economic situation. The canned goods, donated by the members of our community, will be given to those families after having been used to build a sculpture that will be exhibited in a local and then, hopefully, in a national contest as part of the project “Canstruction”, addressed to all Portuguese schools.