ABSTRACT
Teacher education is currently facing major challenges in Portugal. Indeed, it needs to assert its fundamental role in building professional identities and in producing a teaching profession able to provide educational alternatives to the education crisis that has been affecting, over the past decades, not only Portugal but all Western countries in general. In the new millennium, educational and training policies for a more democratic and equitable School are still to be devised. In the second half of the twentieth century, critical theory/critical pedagogy became a particularly relevant approach to all questions concerning the social and the educational world and the world of scientific research. In Portugal, little is known about the extent of its influence in the educational field.
