Configurações culturais e o processo de construção da gestão democrática numa escola secundária

Abstract

Based on a study case focused of a secondary school established for more than a century, in this paper we analyse the evolution of the democratic management model (1974-2000) effectively developed/adapted in the daily life of this school, in articulation with cultural and symbolic specificities historically built by teachers’ practices. The consideration of cultural constraints as factors of recontextualisation of the implementation process of the democratic management allowed an analytical and comprehensive focus over the dynamics of this school organisation, having as a reference the theoretical framework built by Lima (1992, 2000) for the Portuguese public school panorama. In this paper we present the main results of an empirical research and we discuss theoretically the meanings given by school actors to different phases of the legal-formal process of the democratic management.