Education Across Borders: Teachers as Agents of Transborder Cooperation in the Construction of a Common Educational Identity

Ulhôa, Andrea and Araújo e Sá, Maria Helena (2025) Education Across Borders: Teachers as Agents of Transborder Cooperation in the Construction of a Common Educational Identity. JOURNAL OF ADVANCED STUDIES ON BORDERS COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT, 1 (1). pp. 117-134. ISSN 3057-9872

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Abstract

This article offers a critical analysis of schools located along the Portuguese-Spanish border, framing them as spaces of curricular invention and the construction of a transnational educational identity. Drawing on the analysis of the Bilingual and Intercultural Border Schools Project (PEBIF), it examines how teachers, as epistemic and political agents, build collaborative pedagogical practices rooted in the territory and oriented towards the common good. Through a qualitative and cartographic methodology, the study highlights formative episodes in which teaching emerges as a practice of listening, co-authorship, and intercultural mediation. The concept of the border is redefined from a logic of separation to that of a borderscape — a relational, ethical, and political space where bonds, belonging, and relational justice are forged. Emerging from a critical and situated pedagogy, the experience analysed challenges monocultural and securitization paradigms, proposing new educational grammars grounded in plurality, linguistic hospitality, and the making of a shared commons. The article argues that the teachers involved in PEBIF not only reinvent the curriculum but also reposition the school as a territory of resistance and transformation. By recognizing the role of teachers in constructing shared forms of belonging, the text suggests that this experience contributes to rethinking, beyond the educational field, transborder public policies, pointing to the urgency of cooperation practices centred on local actors as knowledge producers and mediators of intercultural justice.

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