The Future of Education

The development of students' democratic participation in the classroom is a priority in today's schools to uphold this crucial right and, therefore, to foster their full participation as active citizens, preparing them for life in society [1]. Accordingly, the present investigation focuses on the study of the democratic participation of students in the Council for Educational Cooperation (CEC), which is a pedagogical strategy included in the syntax of the Modern School Movement in Portugal. The Council for Educational Cooperation originates from the Institutional Pedagogy [2] and it is a time of effective democratic participation, where students manage everything that concerns their group/community, whether it’s curricular learning or social relations that arise from the school/classroom interactions, thus developing socio-moral and cognitive skills [3]. This study involved the participation of 25 students from a 3rd year class of Primary School and aimed to: (i) characterize the students' perceptions regarding the CEC; (ii) describe student participation in the CEC; (iii) identify, with the students' cooperation, strategies to improve the functioning of the CEC; (iv) describe the evolution of student participation in CEC. This is a qualitative study that resorts to action-research methodological procedures. As data gathering techniques, survey by questionnaire, interview, focus group, participant observation and documentary research are privileged. For the data analysis, we resort to content analysis, following the assumptions of Bardin (2013). The results show that all students value the CEC, although most do not participate and have some difficulty in managing it with autonomy and responsibility. It was possible, through structural changes to the CEC suggested by the participating researcher and the students, in a dialogical, reflective and cooperative process, to improve these students’ participation in the Council.