Ulisses F. Araújo

Principles and methods to guide education for purpose: a Brazilian experience

Abstract This article presents a Brazilian experience in training teachers to educate for purpose. Understanding that purpose is a value to be constructed through real-world and contextualised experiences, the authors discuss some psychological processes that underlie purpose development. Then the authors show how these processes are used in a purpose development programme they have conducted for in-service and pre-service teachers over the past six years. Using innovative pedagogies, such as Problem-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, and Design Thinking, the authors describe the steps that teachers have to follow in project development, examples of the results accomplished with this kind of programme, and research findings that are being conducted to analyse the principles and results of this approach for training teachers in how to educate youth for purpose.

Re-inventing School to Develop Active Citizens

This chapter discusses the evolution of education in recent centuries, trying to explain how movements of democratization and universal access to education promoted the universal inclusion of people in the educational processes. Schools have been structured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under principles of exclusion and homogenization which are not reaching the demands of an inclusive education. This situation has an impact on the expectations of knowledge desired by contemporary societies. This impasse has been demanding a re-invention of education, which involves changes in the content, form and relationships between teachers and students within educational settings. Based on the principles of the Positive Psychology, a post-graduate course to re-invent education is presented as well as related concerns to personal and professional ethics. This course combines active learning methodologies with new and diverse information technology and communication tools. The program has been offered to 1,000 Brazilian basic education teachers, aiming at providing instruments for promoting ethical education through topics such as, democratic coexistence; human rights; health; inclusive education; and relationships among school, families and community. The final goal underling these activities is the development of active citizens.

Citizenship Education and Social Participation in an Unequal Society: The Case of Brazil

Schooling has a central role in the development of moral, just and active citizens of the generations to come. In this chapter, by presenting experiences of citizenship education in Brazil, we try to demonstrate how educators can foster students to build their intelligence, identity and values through dialogue with peers, teachers, family and culture. One way to reach that is through school forums, an institutional space of participatory democracy where students, staff, families and the community can work on everyday facts in the search for solutions to the ethical issues they face. Our aim is that readers who believe in the utopia of a more just, less unequal and less authoritarian world find inspiration in the chapter to continue in the pursuit of social justice through education.