Sérgio Niza: a brave Portuguese pedagogue

Abstract

This topic's interview is primarily aimed at providing the Brazilian public with substantial information and reflection about Movimento da Escola Moderna - a Portuguese association for cooperatively organized teacher self-training on all school levels, operating across the Portuguese territory since the mid-1970's. An interview was therefore conducted with Sérgio Niza, founder and head at the Centro de Formação de Professores and at Escola Moderna, a journal, both of which are connected to Movimento da Escola Moderna. The editorial work was done by Julio Groppa Aquino, an associate professor at Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo. Through the in loco dialogue between interviewer and interviewee in September 2012, a sort of historic record comes forth, along with a critical-analytical one, about questions that have been essential to school practice since the return of democracy in Portugal in the 1970s and that seem to match in so many aspects the Brazilian situation and its peculiar inflections. With Movimento da Escola Moderna as the core subject of the interview, Sérgio Niza brings up the proposal of creating spaces for collective training management focused on theoretical-practical reflection about the pedagogic everyday life, offering also a sharp evaluation of the Portuguese education in the last few decades. Moreover, the interview brings us a timely reflection on Escola da Ponte (the Portuguese experience that is best known among Brazilians), as well as lucid considerations about contemporary Brazil, exhorting it to "go much further" in education.