The meeting place

Reflections on pedagogical practice

Abstract

This text reflects on the sustained practice of teaching activities at the University of Porto that began in the mid-1980’s. Within this existential exercise, we seek to clarify the choices and decisions for sustaining a given practice. We organised this trajectory into four main stages: 1) the beginning of professional life – faced with the fact that teaching is left to the individual’s knowledge, we discuss how we solved the issue of having to plan and teach a class; 2) we discuss the
«classroom», which we envisage a meeting point – we see it as more than a place for information
transmission, thereby rescuing it from cognitive reductionism – as we are social animals, we conclude that learning and, more generally, education, can only be relational phenomena; 3) we then derive some consequences from this circumstance, including the pedagogical principles that rule us, and identifying concrete strategies to implement them in daily teaching practice; 4) lastly, we reflect on transformation, conceived as adaptation, renovation and innovation. We critique the identification of innovation with increased technicalities in teaching methods. Instead, we present it as a result of the spontaneous interplay between research and teaching-learning – a fundamental interaction for the identity of a University.