CEAD's mission is to promote and carry out research activities on Adult Education and Community Intervention, in order to build and disseminate scientific knowledge with educational and social utility, as well as to support planning and decision-making processes in the field.

In view of the reduced volume of research in Adult Education in Portugal, and the lack of systematization of available information, we want to build a flexible centre, opened to researchers from all over the national territory, interested in cooperating in favour of this mission.

The values that guide our activity are as follows:

Intellectual Freedom: Research must be guided by freedom of thought, which opens doors to collaboration, participation and creativity, providing an environment beneficial to innovation and social change.

Social Responsibility: as researchers and interpreters of social reality and the problems that affect adults of all ages in our communities, we want to contribute to investigate significant issues and, consequently, contribute to the resolution of societal problems and to advocate with public policies.

Academic integrity: we want to assume an attitude of ethical commitment at different levels: first, in relation to the procedures and methodologies used in our research; second, contributing to the scientific initiation of younger researchers, but outright refusing any academic coercive attitudes, in all their forms. This commitment extends not only to the relationship with younger researchers, but also to different forms of communication with colleagues from different fields of the scientific community.

Lifelong Education: as researchers in Adult Education, we believe that education takes place in all spaces and throughout the life cycle. We also believe that adult education can make a significant contribution to the dynamics of social change and to improve the quality of life of adults, an adult being any individual from the end of adolescence to the last stages of life.

Communicate: our research must be shared with the national and international scientific community, but also with the communities we integrate. In this sense, our communication plan includes sharing results in community, public spaces, outside academic contexts, in order to reach the largest possible audience.