
José Ferreira-Alves
- Assistant ProfessorInstitutionUniversidade do Minho
My academic course began in the teacher education domain; I was an instructor in developmental psychology and educational psychology courses applied to teaching. Matching the thinking of other researchers, I looked at teacher education as a context to foster teachers' understanding and skills to make them human development practitioners. The results of this commitment and inquiries were my Master's and later PhD thesis at the University of Minho. My book, co-authored by my mentor Óscar Gonçalves and published in 2001, "Educação narrativa do professor" ("Teacher's narrative education"), was also a product of those inquiries. We proposed a program for teacher education that would allow each teacher to understand and construct proactively meaningful stories of development and learning for their students and themselves. Meanwhile, I was privileged to be the instructor of courses on the psychology of adult development in graduate programs of Education and Psychology. I have mentored several students in research projects on the well-being and development of adults and older adults. Additionally and in parallel, I was privileged to be an instructor of courses in the history of psychology, developmental psychology, and health psychology for students of Psychology. These experiences of teaching and mentoring students have led me to believe that it would be essential to explore and articulate aging and adult development. Therefore since the beginning, I was strongly influenced by division 20 of APA. More specifically, my research is exploring how successful aging, loneliness, well-being, elderly mistreatment, bereavement, health indicators are related to developmental outcomes. Finally, a teaching and research interest in the history of psychology is being fortified and will gain visibility soon. The same with research involving how dialectical thinking is associated with some other developmental outcomes