PORTUGUESE PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS’ REPRESENTATIONS OF CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Abstract

Against the backdrop of an environment strongly marked by uncertainty, particularly as regards the conditions for the evolution of modern political project of building a democratic society, with its unfulfi lled promises, the Portuguese State has delegated to the public school the task of politically socializing young people, creating to this a curriculum area of Citizenship Education in primary and secondary education. As part of a research project on the political socialization of students from Portuguese public high schools, we sought to know what are the representations of the citizenship education mobilized by the same students. The qualitative research comprised four geographically contrasting schools with a very diverse social morphology in which interviews were conducted to pairs of students attending the last grade of high school, totaling 90. Through a content thematic analysis, it was found that the observed results reveal us the existence of a plurality of representations mobilized by the students, corresponding to different modes of recognition of self and others. This text aims precisely to present a typological topology of these modalities of recognition, which contains the distinct meaning attributed by the students to citizenship and are constituted as a plural network of paths embodiment thereof.