Retratos da Escola

About Retratos da Escola

Retratos da Escola: A Brazilian Education Journal Between the University and the Classroom

Retratos da Escola (print ISSN 1982-131X; online ISSN 2238-4391) — the title means 'Portraits of the School' — is a Brazilian peer-reviewed education journal published in Brasília by the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores em Educação (CNTE), the National Confederation of Workers in Education, through its training school, ESFORCE (Escola de Formação da CNTE). That identity must be grasped before anything else about the journal makes sense. Most education journals are published by a university, a learned society or a commercial house. Retratos da Escola is published by the national organisation of Brazil's education workers, and it was deliberately built as a bridge: a scientific journal for basic education, held to academic standards and edited by university scholars, but addressed to the professionals who work in schools and to the public debate about what Brazilian public education should be. Its pages record, analyse and contest the advances and setbacks of education in Brazil, and they do so from an explicit position in favour of quality public schooling.

The journal's audience and mission follow from that origin. A documentary study of its editorials, published in Acta Scientiarum. Education in 2021 by Cristina Cardoso and Andréa Barbosa Gouveia, concluded — in summary — that the journal offers a historical and political reading of Brazilian educational reality connected to the wider social situation, debates the national agenda alongside the specific demands of the school, and serves as a record for new generations of teachers of the political processes and global education-policy movements within which their profession's gains and losses have been made. That is a fair external description of what a reader finds in its dossiers, interviews, articles, reviews and documents, and it distinguishes the journal from both purely academic education titles and purely campaigning publications: it insists on being both scholarly and engaged, and it organises each issue to prove that the two can coexist.

Identity at a Glance

History: From Organisational Initiative to Scientific Journal

The journal's modern history begins with a decision inside CNTE to build instruments of formation for education workers — among them a training school, ESFORCE, and, as one of its elements, a scientific journal aimed at basic education professionals. A former CNTE director who helped create it later explained the thinking, as quoted in the 2021 documentary study: it was considered fundamental to have a formative process within the confederation with several components, among them a journal as valid as other scientific works but with shorter texts suited to the urgencies of basic education professionals. That sentence explains the journal's enduring format choices — dossiers of focused, readable texts rather than very long monographic articles, and sections that include interviews and documents alongside research articles.

To become a scientific journal in the full sense, the publication needed an academic anchor, and the link was built with the university world — the study records the connection made with the University of Brasília (UnB) — and through its editors. Professor Luiz Fernandes Dourado, of the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), became the first editor of the journal in its scientific format and served from 2008 to 2014. In the first edition in that format, his editorial set out the programme that the journal still recognisably follows: Retratos da Escola would host studies, analyses and research focused on the school and on the protagonism of its professionals, along an editorial line with three axes — (i) professional education / formation of education professionals, (ii) educational work, its conditions and its practices, and (iii) the organisation of the school and of the education system — arranged in Interview, Article, Review and Document sections (Dourado, 2008). In 2014 Leda Scheibe, of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), who was already a member of the editorial board, took over the editorship. The dossier structure was maintained, with adjustments over time to how themes were distributed.

Two later developments documented in the same scholarship matter for present-day authors. From 2018 the journal became four-monthly — three issues a year — increasing the regularity with which dossiers could respond to a fast-moving national education agenda. And from that period it maintained versions in Portuguese and in Spanish, an arrangement the study connects to CNTE's action within Education International, the global federation of education organisations. The Spanish presence is not a cosmetic translation policy; it places Brazilian debates — on funding, on teacher careers, on curriculum, on privatisation pressures — into a Latin American and international conversation among education workers and researchers facing comparable reforms.

The volume sequence corroborates the timeline: Volume 2 corresponds to 2008, Volume 4 to 2010, Volume 6 to 2012, Volume 8 to 2014, Volume 10 to 2016 and Volume 13 to 2019, a steady annual progression consistent with a journal that settled into its scientific format in the late 2000s and has published continuously since. Editorials across those volumes — marking, for instance, twenty years of Brazil's national education law (the LDB) in 2016, and taking stock of losses and damages in education in 2019 — show the journal performing its recording function in real time, issue by issue.

Scope: Three Axes and a Dossier System

The three editorial axes announced in 2008 remain the clearest guide to scope. The first axis, the formation of education professionals, covers initial and continuing teacher education, national curricular guidelines for teacher formation, professional master's and in-service programmes, and the knowledge that teachers need and build. The second axis, educational work — its conditions and practices — covers what teachers and other school workers actually do and under what circumstances: careers, pay and valorisation of the profession, workloads, school everyday practices, pedagogical work, and the effects of policy on the labour of education. The third axis, the organisation of the school and the system, covers governance, federalism in education, funding, evaluation, curriculum policy, the relation between public and private provision, and the architecture of basic education as a system. A manuscript that speaks to at least one axis, and ideally shows how its axis connects to the school as a lived institution, is a candidate for the journal; a manuscript on education in the abstract, with no Brazilian or comparative grounding in school reality and no bearing on education professionals, will struggle to find its place in a dossier.

The wider topic map recorded in the JournalsWorld entry for the title — education pedagogy and practices, education and public policy, global educational policies and reforms, gender, sexuality and education, politics and the economics of education policy, critical and liberating pedagogy, race and identity in Brazilian education, the history of education research in Brazil, and teacher education and leadership — is consistent with that programme, provided it is read as an elaboration of the three axes rather than as a licence to submit on any education topic whatsoever. The journal's critical orientation is part of its scope, openly stated in its history: it publishes work that examines the advance of private and market logics in public education, the effects of global policy movements on national systems, and the defence of education as a public right. Authors do not need to share a single party line — the dossier system deliberately gathers different perspectives on a theme, as its editors have noted — but they should expect their work to be read in a journal whose questions are about public education, its workers and its democratic purposes.

The dossier is the organising device. Rather than gathering unrelated articles, issues are built around themes that reflect the national agenda and the school's demands: a dossier might address a reform, a funding settlement, a curricular change, a dimension of teaching work or a historical question with present stakes. Around the dossier, the standing sections give each issue its rhythm — an interview that brings a significant voice into direct speech, research and analysis articles, reviews that keep readers current with the book literature, and documents that put primary material — a law's interpretation, a manifesto, an official text — on the record. For authors, the practical consequence is to watch the journal's calls and recent dossiers: a strong article submitted against the grain of the journal's current thematic planning may wait longer, or fit less well, than the same article framed for a dossier where its contribution completes a conversation.

The Journal as Record: Editorials, Memory and Teacher Formation

One function of Retratos da Escola is easy to miss if it is judged only as a container for articles: it is an instrument of political-pedagogical formation for teachers, and its editorials are curriculum in that project. The 2021 study of the journal mapped its editors and editorials against the contemporary educational context precisely because the editorials do formative work — they interpret the conjuncture for school professionals, connect a funding decision or a curricular guideline to classroom consequences, and preserve a running interpretation of Brazilian education across governments. Read in sequence, the editorials form a chronicle: the push for obligatory, free basic education; federalism and the construction of state policies; the twentieth anniversary of the LDB; the balance of losses in a period of retrenchment. A researcher studying Brazilian education policy in the twenty-first century can use that chronicle as a primary source, and a teacher reading it gains what the journal's founders intended — a way to locate daily school experience inside national and global movements.

That formative mission also explains the journal's tone and lengths. Texts are scholarly but written to be read by busy professionals; interviews make leading researchers and education figures speak accessibly; documents are printed so that readers can judge primary material for themselves. International readers should not mistake that accessibility for lightness. The dossiers cite and engage the Brazilian and international research literature, the editors and board are drawn from the universities, and the journal is indexed within Brazil's scholarly ecosystem for education — the JournalsWorld record lists an h-index of 22, a figure that, for a Portuguese-language education title addressed partly to practitioners, reflects substantial citation within its national field rather than a global citation market. As with all such figures, it should be checked live before being quoted in an evaluation file.

Who Publishes, Who Reads, and How to Approach Submission

Authorship in the journal spans university researchers in education, graduate researchers, and scholars connected to education movements and public institutions; the editorial history — editors from UFG and UFSC, an early link to UnB — reflects a board culture rooted in Brazil's federal universities. The readership is double by design: the academic community in education, for whom the journal is a citable, dossier-based research venue, and the wider community of basic education professionals and their organisations, for whom it is formation and record. Articles that serve both readerships — rigorous in method and literature, clear in exposition, explicit about implications for schools and for policy — are the journal's characteristic successes.

Prospective authors should proceed as follows. Work in Portuguese or, where the journal's current calls allow, in Spanish, and prepare the manuscript to the journal's live author guidelines on its official site — this profile deliberately does not reproduce formatting rules that the journal may revise. Frame the article for one of the three axes and, where possible, for a current or forthcoming dossier theme. State the school-level stakes of the research: which professionals, which conditions of work, which organisational arrangements does the study illuminate? Engage the Brazilian literature on the question, including this journal's own earlier dossiers where they are relevant — editors of a dossier-based title notice when a submission ignores the conversation it hopes to join. And respect the journal's engaged character: a purely technical study that brackets out the public purposes of education may be excellent work for another venue while being a poor fit here.

Charges, licensing and detailed indexing information should be verified on the journal's official pages at the time of submission, since this profile is based on the journal's documented history and scholarly studies of it, and operational details can change without altering that history. What can be stated from the documented record is the journal's model: published by CNTE through ESFORCE, edited by university scholars, organised in dossiers, appearing three times a year in its four-monthly rhythm from 2018, and maintained in Portuguese and Spanish.

Retratos da Escola Among Brazilian Education Journals

Brazil has a rich education journal landscape, much of it university-published and SciELO-indexed. Within that landscape, Retratos da Escola occupies a specific and defensible niche: it is the scientific journal of the organised education workers themselves. That position gives it three advantages no university title can simply copy. It has direct access to the profession's experience and to documents and debates inside the movement for public education. It has a guaranteed second readership beyond academia, which disciplines its writing toward clarity. And it has a memory function — its dossiers and editorials, taken together, are one of the places where the history of Brazilian education policy since the late 2000s has been interpreted as it happened, from the standpoint of the school and its professionals. For researchers of education policy, teacher work and the politics of reform in Brazil and Latin America, that makes the journal both a venue and a source: a place to publish analysis, and an archive to be analysed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Retratos da Escola? The Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores em Educação (CNTE), through its training school ESFORCE, in Brasília.

What does the title mean? 'Portraits of the School' — a name that matches its programme of studies, analyses and research focused on the school and the protagonism of its professionals.

What are its ISSNs? 1982-131X (print) and 2238-4391 (online). Use them to distinguish it from other Brazilian education titles.

How is an issue organised? Around thematic dossiers, with Interview, Article, Review and Document sections, a structure set out in the journal's scientific-format relaunch under its first editor in that format, Luiz Fernandes Dourado, in 2008.

How often does it appear, and in which languages? Four-monthly from 2018 — three issues a year — in Portuguese, with a Spanish version maintained from that period in connection with CNTE's international work.

Conclusion

Retratos da Escola is best understood as a deliberate construction: a national education workers' confederation decided that its members deserved, and Brazilian public education needed, a scientific journal of their own — academically edited, dossier-based, addressed to basic education, and committed to recording and contesting the direction of education policy. From its 2008 scientific-format programme of three axes and four sections, through the editorships of Luiz Fernandes Dourado and Leda Scheibe, to its four-monthly, bilingual rhythm from 2018, it has sustained that construction. Researchers working on education policy, teaching work, school organisation or teacher formation in Brazil — and readers anywhere who want Brazilian education debates in the words of the scholars and professionals living them — should know this journal, and should verify operational details on its official site before submitting.

A Note on Evidence and Verification for International Readers

International readers assessing this journal should be aware of how much of its documentation is in Portuguese and inside Brazilian scholarly infrastructure. The most substantial independent account available in the sources consulted for this profile is the 2021 documentary study by Cardoso and Gouveia in Acta Scientiarum. Education, which worked directly from the journal's editorials and from interviews with participants in its creation, and which is therefore the appropriate starting point for anyone who needs to verify the history summarised here — the ESFORCE origin, the UnB connection, the editorships of Dourado and Scheibe, the three axes and four sections of the 2008 programme, and the move to a four-monthly, Portuguese-and-Spanish rhythm from 2018. Where operational details such as current submission deadlines, article processing arrangements or the composition of the present editorial board are concerned, the journal's own official site is the authoritative source and should be consulted directly, because those details change more quickly than the journal's documented history.