Are students and teachers ready for Bologna? A pedagogical project in a tourism course

The implementation of the Bologna process in higher education leads to rethinking the teaching-learning assumptions. Higher education today is focused on curricula, teaching-learning processes, subjects and course programmes attending to European credits system, teachers’ qualification and training, academic success and scholar results, performance standards, assessment of institutions, assessment of skills (and not merely knowledge). In 2010 a project (Construction of Learning | ConstAp) was developed in the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Portugal. The main goal was to motivate the adoption of changes concerning classroom methodologies and students’ autonomous workload guidance in the scope of the Bologna process implementation. This paper presents a proposal of pedagogical intervention to deal with the mentioned objectives, a project applied in a specific tourism course. The paper presents the first results collected regarding the project’s implementation and seeks to impart a methodology that can be applied to similar courses.