Planning of the curriculum of portuguese as mother tongue in portuguese secondary schools

Abstract

Related to the curricular reform of the Secondary Education in 2001, political-administrative and conceptual changes were discussed and implemented in Portugal in terms of the curriculum, substantiated in new teaching syllabus. It was in this context that a new syllabus of Portuguese as mother tonge appeared, requiring a curricular reconfiguration and changes in teachers' conceptions and teaching practices. Assuming that the changes en the official speech don't determine those transformations, we want to determine, in schools of the region of Sintra, the way of appropriation of the curricular aims established for the teaching levels of the syllabus and to conclude about the underlying teaching and learning paradigms of teachers' options in its implementation. Since the curriculum is a dynamic reality, wich suffers processes of deliberation, we can still infer the teachers' margins of adherence and distancing as regards the two curricular dimensions: the one of the established curriculum and the one of the curriculum-in-action through a poll, in Sintra's schools, on the teachers' perceptions about the strategies they privilege the implementation of the national curriculum.