Portugal’s (post–)colonial pedagogy: A history of legitimization and “re”–imagination

This thesis works to explicate the positioning of colonial praxis within the Portuguese school over time—beginning with the dictatorship, and then moving through post-revolutionary phases, forward into the 21st century—paying close attention to textbook studies and policy reform in hopes of demystifying the context enabling this perceived inability to move past the fetishization of the colonial figures, as well as to understand what may have prevented a meaningful shift within the educational sector following the revolutionary period of transition after April 25th, 1974. This project gives special focus to the analysis of persisting colonial ideologies within present curricular structures, reform, goals, and documents to make clear how educational materials function as instruments of identity building and the possible implications that arise with a resident ongoing coloniality of power within these tools.