João Amado is an Associate Professor with Aggregation, Retired, from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra. He was also professor of Philosophy in Secondary Education, Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Lisbon. Doctorate, with Aggregation, in Educational Sciences, he conducted several subjects, coordinated and participated in several national and international research projects and was the author and co-author of books, book chapters, articles and communications on topics such as indiscipline and violence in school, bullying and cyberbullying, epistemology of educational sciences, qualitative research methodology, higher education pedagogy, ethnography and childhood history. In 2016 he received the Outstanding Qualitative Book Award Spanish or Portuguese Language Book, attributed to the Handbook for Qualitative Research in Education (Press from the University of Coimbra, 2013, 2014, 2017), of which he is coordinator and co-author, awarded by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquire. Since 1980, he has maintained attention and interest in the traditional playful heritage of childhood in the mentioned research areas, having published several works (books, chapters, articles) on popular traditional games and toys, of which the books stand out: Universe of Popular Toys (2002; 2007) and Popular Traditional Toys: Heritage and Childhood Memories (2020). He is currently a mentor and coordinator of the School of Traditional Popular Toy, a community experience carried out in collaboration with the Sports and Recreational Association of Loureiro (village in the parish of Cernache/Coimbra) with the aim of preserving, musealization and disseminating a collection made up of materials and documents referring to that type of toys whose particularity is that they were made by the children themselves, in line with a tradition that is simultaneously universal and millenary.
