What do students say about pedagogical innovation practices in higher education? This was the theme of the oral presentation given by the CLIL | Católica Learning Innovation Lab at the 10th National Congress on Pedagogical Practices in Higher Education (CNaPPES 2024), held at ISCAP | Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto from 8 to 9 July 2024.

Diana Soares, CLIL coordinator, and Maitê Gil, Education and Professional Development Specialist at CLIL, attended the congress, accompanied by the undergraduate students in Psychology Beatriz Bértolo and Beatriz Granja da Silva. The students from the Psychology degree programme at the Faculty of Education and Psychology of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (FEP-UCP) contributed to the work presented at CNaPPES 2024 through the FEP-UCP Researcher's Club.

The oral presentation was made by the two undergraduate students and is in line with one of the CLIL lines of action, which is to involve students as partners in the process of designing and evaluating the laboratory's pedagogical innovation initiatives.

The work focused on an intervention carried out in a curricular unit (CU) in the first year of the master’s in psychology, where a focused discussion group was organised with students on different dimensions of their learning experiences. It was concluded that the experiences most valued by the students were the pedagogical relationship established with the faculty, the feedback received, the dynamics proposed in the classroom and the resources made available.

Involving students in the dynamics of pedagogical innovation in CLIL

For Maitê Gil, the participation of the two students in CNaPPES 2024 demonstrates “the effective integration of the student 'voice' in the dynamics of pedagogical innovation underway in CLIL”.

“I believe that the experience of being able to participate in all the stages of preparing a scientific article, as well as later discussing it with other researchers from different fields, has allowed me to broaden my horizons through the exchange of knowledge and innovative pedagogical ideas. Here I felt welcomed by the faculty, that my opinion mattered and that I was contributing to research while having fun at the same time,” says student Beatriz Granja.

“What do the students say? Students as partners in pedagogical innovation practices” was the title of the paper presented.