The history teacher education process in Portugal: a mixed method study about professionalism development

Abstract

The historical and professional identity of prospective history teachers seems to be central to understanding how these future teachers think of their educational action in articulation with their view of what it means to be historically competent in line with the development of historical literacy and more sophisticated historical consciousness. Thus, in the context of the Master’s Degree in History Teaching in the 3rd Cycle of Basic Education and in Secondary Education offered by the University of Minho (Portugal), following an investigative approach characterised by a Mixed Method in a longitudinal framework, data were collected through an open-answer questionnaire followed by a closed-answer questionnaire. The open-answer questionnaire was proposed at the beginning of the training of prospective History teachers and at the end of the same training course. About twenty answers were obtained and, through their analysis, essentially two types of identities emerged: one more in line with management professionalism and another with the emerging democratic professionalism. Based on the qualitative data, which was analysed inductively, a closed-answer questionnaire was created, intended to understand, through quantitative analysis, the ideas of future Portuguese History teachers about the purposes of being a History teacher, what it means to think historically, what kind of History class they identify with, what should students learn in History classes and whether they should use the terms ‘we’ or ‘the Portuguese’ when presenting the proposals for studying the national historical reality. This questionnaire was applied to students from various Master’s Degree courses in History Teaching, in a purposeful sampling considering the location of Portuguese universities, namely the University of Minho, University of Porto, University of Coimbra, University of Lisbon, and NOVA University of Lisbon.