Educational policies and higher education: analysis of its internationalization in the context of the work in the academic profession in portugal

Abstract

It is in the context of the increasing Europeanization of educational policies that the latest and important legislative changes generated in the Portuguese higher education system must be understood. Convergent with the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), Portugal allied to the Bologna process and reformed, in the second half of the 2000s, its higher education system in the structures and ways of institutional government. Considering that the academic profession is a key element in the mission of the university (WILSON 1962; ALTABCH, 2011), it also is central in the construction of the EHEA. The purpose of this article is to examine how the new educational policies have produced changes in the context and working conditions of teachers/researchers at public universities in Portugal. The text begins by identifying the main policy measures that form the new legal framework of higher education, with particular emphasis to the new Statute of Teaching Career. Then we analyze the perceptions of academics around the development of the academic profession occurred over the past forty years linking it with the dimension of the internationalization of higher education. The results obtained allow us to state that the academic profession is international by nature. However, this nature complicated itself and diversified, resizing the internationalization, moving from ‘optionality logic' to 'mandatory logic'.