CALL FOR PAPERS

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, the project “FYT-ID – Fifty Years of Teaching: Factors of Change and Intergenerational Dialogues” (PTDC/CED-EDG/1039/2021) and the CIIE – Centre for Research and Intervention in Education at the University of Porto, invites the academic community, researchers, educators, teachers and education professionals to participate in the conference Teachers’ Lives Today: Challenges and Transformations (NeTLives – New Teachers’ Lives), to be held from June 5 to 7, 2025, at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto.

Recent years have been marked by signs of a worldwide crisis in recruiting professionals to teach from preschool to secondary education levels and by the deterioration of working conditions and the socio-remuneration status of teaching careers. Unfortunately, these phenomena are recurring when we observe the teaching profession through a historical lens. Teaching is a complex, intricate, and challenging professional activity that balances social and personal dimensions. Teachers have always worked in ever-changing organisational, pedagogical and technological environments. This constant renewal is due either to the different educational backgrounds, languages ​​, and cultures intersected in the classroom or to the fostering of pedagogies based on mutual respect, inclusion, tolerance, recognition of differences in cultural and gender identity, collaborative work and peacebuilding. In this context, teachers aim to help students understand and connect critically with their pasts, presents, and futures to fight against inequality, exclusion, and marginalisation.

In UNESCO’s vision for a new social contract in education (2021), teachers are central, and their profession must be reimagined and revalued as a collaborative endeavour that generates new knowledge and drives educational and social transformation. This perspective is reinforced by teachers’ consistent capacity to support diverse pathways to student success, as evidenced, for example, by their critical role in projects that promoted societal democratisation and, more recently, in facing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic challenges.

The lives of those who professionally dedicate themselves to teaching combine factors of multifaceted orders (personal, social, scientific, institutional, political, organisational, pedagogical, cultural, gender, and technological factors, among others). These aspects call for academic and socio-professional drawing from a Freirean perspective of sharing and analysing vocations, evocations and vocalisations that reveal the teaching profession's epistemological, ethical and ontological dimensions. Considering this framework, studies on the last fifty years of teaching are vital to understand the dynamics that have shaped and continue to transform education locally and globally. This conference will explore the various change factors that have influenced the teaching and the teaching profession while addressing future challenges in a constantly developing context.

The conference welcomes original submissions in four languages – Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English – based on empirical studies, theoretical reviews, practical experiences, or innovative projects, engaged, specifically or broadly, with the following themes:

• Educational Policies, Rights and Social Change
• Curriculum, Teaching-Learning, and Assessment
• Pedagogies, Material Culture and Technologies
• Teacher Training
• Teacher Identities and Professionalisms
• Agency, Leadership and Professional Development
• Intergenerational Dialogues in the Teaching Profession
• Students, Schools, Communities, and Families
• Histories and Memories of the Teaching Profession
• Teachers’ Lives: Theories and Methodologies

The NeTLives conference is an invitation to reflect and share knowledge, projects, experiences, methodologies and outcomes on the role played by teachers in shaping transformative education. It seeks to draw lessons from the past while envisioning a future full of possibilities.

We look forward to your contribution.

Welcome to NeTLives!