Contenu du sommaire : La construction sociale des savoirs étudiants

How to Adapt to “New Audiences » in Higher Education ? A Study of Practical Experience in Teaching Sociology to Large Groups of Students. Based on a study of our own student population, this article attempts to understand the factors that contribute to cours attendance as well as to exam success for first year students in sociology in a provincial French university. We also examine their assessment of the cursus and their demands regarding teaching methods and find that they are closely linked to their academic performance in high School as well as to their future academic and professional prospects. Finally, after describing a number of teaching techniques adopted in reaction to the specific circumstances of teaching large groups of students, we examine the question of how different faculties and disciplines adapt to “new audiences” that are present today in institutions of higher Education.

Knowledge Transmission in Higher Education. A Comparison between History and Sociology. Forms of student socialization in different academic fields is rousing interest in France. Do different fields of studies produce different study habits and different styles of students ? This article examines this question, focusing on a comparison between two fields : History and Sociology. More than students' practices, the authors question means of knowledge transmission and professors' habits. Their analysis is based on a recent survey conducted in several French universities and, in particular, on lecture observation.

Gender Differences in Higher Education : How Male and Female Students. Carry out the Various Tasks in Work during their First Year at University Reproduction theories, focusing mainly on social determinants other than those inherent to the school system itself, have shown the important role educational institutions can play in perpetuating social inequality. High female attendance rates in higher educational establishments and the high success rates achieved by girls during the last three decades show that important changes have occurred in this respect. Sociologists have taken this improvement as a result mainly of girls' attitudes, since they are thought to take the rules and standards of education more seriously than boys. However, very few sociological studies have actually examined young people's approach to the learning process and the way they perform educational tasks. In this paper, we propose to examine the question of gender differences in higher education, focusing on how male and female students carry out the various tasks involved in work during their first year at University. Results show that the way students manage their time and handle their work, in general, and the way they prepare for examinations differ considerably between the two sexes.

Forms of Student Reading and Scholastic Categories of Reading Understanding. Science student, and especially those in preparatory classes, experience a gap as far as reading practices, and more widely cultural practices, are concerned. At the top of academic legitimacy, they live, outside of the academic context, in a world that still favors literary and artistic culture and then turn towards the cultural products which bring them closer to the students less socially and scholastically endowed (STS et IUT) than to the students of a more “noble” but a more literary academic education. Beyond the established quantitative facts, science and technology students force the sociologist to consider the declarability conditions of reading practices and the scholastic categories of reading understanding.

Aged Unemployed and Too Old Unemployed. Articulation of Administrative and Interpretative Categories. In this text, the ageing process of the unemployed is considered as the consequence of age categorization, and the analysis is focused on the production and the functioning of social categories. The public policies are the first mechanism, because the category ‘unemployed fifty-year-old and more' is henceforth the basis of the public action focused on the less employable unemployed. This administrative category is stabilized, established and legitimated. Also it constitutes for unemployed people and recruiters or professional counselors practical and cognitive resources to define and qualify the situations of the unemployed. But it does not fix an imperative and strict order, because the process of categorization implies interpretative work and a negotiation concerning the legitimity of the produced interpretations. Therefore, the second mechanism is located in the course of the interactive and reflexive activities which organize the everyday life of the unemployed. Another ageing category emerges there, which is an interpretative one: ‘too old unemployed'. Finally, the age of unemployed people is a very clear example of the heterogeneity of social categorization. It is an articulation between an administrative register characterized by the imposition of discontinuous categories handled by official institutions, and an interpretative register characterized by the production of continuous categories in language games.