Doktorandprojekt In this dissertation I examine school journeys in secondary education in Portugal in relation to progressive education ideas, namely how this active method was imagined, argued and reportedly undertaken.
On the one hand, I aim to expand the knowledge about school journeys’ introduction, implementation and naturalisation by looking at that particular education system between 1894 and 1960. On the other hand, I also aim to contribute to the understanding of progressive education itself by showing the ways in which activities based on observation, study and experience contributed to both knowledge transference and production of subjectivities.
To do so, I scrutinised pedagogues’ monographs and didactical handbooks, secondary education legislation, education press articles, school principals’ annual reports and schools’ yearbooks, and centred the analysis on the concepts grammar of schooling, educational paradox and alchemy of school subjects. Following the analysis, which made visible the tensions, discontinuities and the continuities, such as the desired active learning towards one’s emancipation and the persistence of mechanisms of the criticized passive teaching-transmission tradition, I argue that school journeys must be understood in relation to the ‘reason’ of schooling, i.e., the ‘logic’ that classifies, orders and governs the subjects in schooling. And that, in this context, school journeys are part of a naturalized gesture that established objective systems to apprehend both individuals and the world, connecting each other by shaping an idea of cultural empowerment and emancipation through knowledge and identity while at the same time providing strength to a standardized worldview, guarantying not only the preservation and transmission of cultural objects and values over generations, but also guarantying the continuity of stable narratives.
