Mobility and expertise in the process of hiring the first group of teachers in Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon)

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century the contributors to the renewal and innovation of technical education in Portugal were, on one side, foreigners who studied in the main universities and engineering schools in Europe, and on another, Portuguese engineers who were trained in foreign schools that were prestigious at an international level. In national schools, foreign teachers started being recruited and they joined the first group of docents of the Instituto Superior Técnico, to which some teachers of the previously Instituto Comercial de Lisboa became associated, as well as other docents, selected by their technical and scientifical knowledge and achievements in professional practice. 

One of the main contributions of this analysis resides in verifying, through the reference of the individual processes of foreign teachers in IST, verifying how  decisive this national and European network of engineers was in the choice to hire those teachers, and how Portugal was framed in a supranational network of the mobility of specialists and of circulation of knowledge.