Duração: 2020 – 2021
Principal Researcher
Maria Pacheco Figueiredo
Team Members
Susana Amante
Funding: CGD; IPV
Research line:
Educational Policies, Teaching Methods and Training
Several challenges have been posed to Portuguese and European Higher Education, with many of them located in the pedagogical arena. Although Pedagogy in Higher Education is not a deeply explored field, there are high-quality studies, initiatives, projects, and structures at the national level. A significant part of the advances in the field has resulted from the analysis, sharing, and systematic discussion of practices that have been embodied in various publications and supported various interventions in Portugal and internationally. The EQuIPES – Study of Quality and Pedagogical Innovation in Higher Education aims to contribute to this body of experiences and studies that allow understanding and improving teaching and learning in Higher Education institutions, based on the analysis of practices at the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu in communication with partners. Based on projects from the institute itself and at the national level, EQuIPES aims to characterize how teaching is conducted at IPV and identify the supports and constraints recognized by teachers in their pedagogical practices. From this diagnosis, the goal is to move towards the identification, characterization, and discussion of quality practices, especially those related to active learning that embody pedagogical innovation. Active learning is understood as a set of flexible practices that seek student engagement through the use of approaches that shift the center of activities from the teacher and often involve digital technologies. These practices, substantiated by various records and in-depth analyses, and involving multiple participants, are shared and discussed with the close and extended community. The study adopts a mixed methodology. It begins with a questionnaire survey covering the entire IPV, accompanied by direct observation of spaces used for teaching, recorded on a specific observation grid. In the second phase, case studies are identified for pedagogical practices with active learning approaches, which are intended to be characterized and analyzed with the involvement of external experts in a team. The teachers involved in these case studies are invited to organize the sharing of these practices in peer-to-peer training spaces open to IPV teachers and the community, once again accompanied by interventions from the experts.
With this approach, the intention is to contribute to the visibility of Pedagogy in Higher Education, linked to the development and utilization of active learning approaches.