Liliana M. Zeferino

Background

Some careers can be described through milestones. Mine is defined by a persistent question: education. Not only schooling, with its curricula, timetables, and assessments, but education in a broader sense—as the process of enabling people to stand on their own, recover their voice, reclaim possibilities, and find direction. Throughout my professional journey, I have come to understand that what is often labelled as “failure” is rarely the result of an individual deficit. Rather, it emerges from unequal relationships with knowledge, recognition, and the very right to exist as a learner.

I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Educational Sciences and a Master’s degree in Educational Sciences, specializing in Adult Education. It was during my master’s studies that this concern found both form and place. For approximately one year, I lived in Mozambique, where I worked as a trainer at a women’s education centre called WUXA—a word in Ronga, the local language, meaning “rebirth.” There, education revealed itself in its most fundamental form: not merely as the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but, above all, as a process of reconstructing the self. Learning often became the first act of self-affirmation—a quiet yet profound movement through which individuals began to recognize themselves as capable of thinking, making decisions, and transforming their own life trajectories, thereby reshaping their futures.

I returned with the conviction that education always unfolds through visible and invisible layers, and that what is ultimately at stake is not only what people learn, but the relationship they develop with themselves as individuals capable of learning. Back in Portugal, I worked as a pedagogical coordinator in private schools, closely accompanying diverse educational pathways and observing how educational systems can simultaneously open and constrain opportunities and future possibilities.

Later, I spent approximately four years working on international cooperation and development projects in Brazil and Paraguay with populations experiencing multiple forms of social vulnerability. In these contexts, education once again emerged beyond the boundaries of formal schooling, embedded in community practices, strategies of survival, and everyday forms of resilience. It became increasingly clear to me that learning is not simply about accumulating knowledge; it is also about positioning oneself within society and responding to structural inequalities.

After returning to Portugal, I coordinated the university volunteering programme at the University of Aveiro and resumed pedagogical leadership roles in several educational institutions. During this period, a central question gradually crystallized and has since guided my work: How do individuals construct meaning from their educational experiences, and how does this process shape what they believe is possible for themselves?

Approximately four years ago, I began my PhD in Education and joined the European research project CLEAR – Constructing Learning Outcomes in Europe: A Multilevel Analysis of (Under)Achievement in the Life Course, funded by the Horizon Europe programme, which supports pioneering research in education and social innovation. The project brought together 13 research teams across eight European countries with the aim of understanding how learning outcomes are constructed within deeply unequal social contexts.

Within the CLEAR project, I adopted a life-course perspective, analysing young people’s trajectories as dynamic processes situated at the intersection of individual agency and social structure. Through empirical research and comparative analyses between regions offering greater educational opportunities and regions affected by economic and social decline, I examined how place becomes embedded in biographies, shaping not only educational pathways but also the horizons of possibility that young people construct for themselves. Throughout this work, I employed an intersectional perspective to explore how dimensions such as social class, gender, migration background, and territorial context interact in shaping life trajectories. I also drew upon the lens of spatial justice to examine how unequal access to resources, institutions, and support networks influences educational experiences and opportunities for social participation. Conducted across local, national, and international levels, this research enabled me to develop a situated understanding that connects individual biographies with broader social structures, highlighting how educational trajectories are simultaneously lived, constrained, and continuously negotiated over time.

My doctoral research builds upon this perspective by focusing on young people who have experienced school failure and early school leaving. I seek to understand how they interpret these experiences and how such experiences shape their life trajectories over time. I am particularly interested in the moment when experience becomes narrative, and in how these narratives can either restrict or reopen future possibilities.

I am a member of UIDEF (Research and Development Unit in Education and Training) at the Institute of Education of the University of Lisbon, as well as the international RYOT network, dedicated to the study of young people’s life trajectories across Europe.

My contribution to the field of metacognition emerges from this broader understanding of education. I approach metacognition not simply as an individual cognitive skill, but as a socially structured disposition. The ability to think about one’s own thinking—to evaluate, regulate, and project one’s own trajectory—is not equally distributed. It depends upon experiences of recognition, contexts that foster reflexivity, and life trajectories that teach, or fail to teach, that learning is possible. From this perspective, I seek to contribute to an understanding of metacognition that situates it within the social world, where learning how to learn is often inseparable from learning that one is capable of learning—and perhaps, even more fundamentally, from believing that one has the right to do so.

Ultimately, my work revolves around a simple yet deeply profound question: Who is entitled to see themselves as the subject of their own thinking?