Contenu du sommaire : Anthropologie de l'éducation : pour un tour du monde

The paper offers a summary of the author's personal works on the assessment of schools, school policies and European research on the evolution of regulating modes for school systems. Assessment is developing all over Europe as a remedy for these systems in crisis. However the assessment mechanisms are unanimously criticized for their tools, uses, effects, rigour and usefulness. The reasons behind this paradox are examined in this paper. The authors then attempt to identify and model the remaining national differences in the uses of assessment despite pressures for European harmonisation. Finally the stakes specific to local assessments are studied as only the latter can impact positively on practices: it finally examines how the agents in charge of conducting local assessments across Europe work.

The USA has long been concerned about the effectiveness of math teaching. Indeed education officials and politicians alike have even supported a “back to basics” approach and the development of rigorous assessment tools as a means to improve school achievement in maths. However international studies show that such reforms might not be the most suitable solution. The authors through this qualitative survey explore the French approach to math teaching in elementary schools from interviews, class observations and data-like documents. They set up a theoretical framework and show that in France lessons are provided to the whole class according to teaching methods focusing on the explanation of mathematical concepts instead of doing practical exercises. The national curriculum is rather non prescriptive and teachers are somehow involved in local management. In their conclusion the authors claim that the keys to the French success in maths can be explained by formative assessment, skilled teachers in this subject, policies and practices which help pupils with difficulties as well as the use of constructivist methods. They encourage researchers specializing in comparative studies to go beyond the results of international comparisons and examine in greater details the questions of educational policies and teaching practices.

In the classical model of socialization within the republican school, morality goes through discipline which requires regular action. It is this principle and its analogy with the religious model of education that we would like to bring to light in a first part. Then we will redefine discipline and regularity relative to the current changes of school and of socializing modes. In a last part we make the assumption that the democratic school system opened to all pupils, as it has become a space of gradual selection, turned regularity into a line of conduct linked as much with a regulation and a demand for success as with social morality.

The author relies on her experience as Anthropology and Education Quarterly's chief editor to start to delineate the different movements in anthropology and education around the world. She interrogates the links between researchers in anthropology, ethnography, educational sociology through the networks they build up, the meaning they give to words, the similarities in their approaches and the creolization of some ideas of a country or a language environment to another. The weight of institutional and political contexts at national or international level which influence research is considered through the study of recurring topics. She is aware of the risky ambition of her project and yet has embarked on it to encourage researchers, through comparison, to challenge highly insular research programmes and explanatory models. The purpose is to delineate the framework and the context for the development of their national and international references, their issues and their contributions. As she differentiates anthropology from philosophical education in Germany, the different movements of cultural anthropology in the English-speaking world (the United States, Great-Britain, English-speaking Canada), social anthropology and educational ethnography in France, analyses the various approaches in the rest of the French-speaking world, in Russia, in eastern Europe, in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, in Asia, in the Middle East and in Africa she also reveals the social and cultural influences which impact on anthropology and education. In her conclusion, she asserts that the term ‘anthropologies (in the plural) and education' is more appropriate. She adds that a worldwide background on school does not give rise to the creation of a worldwide educational science and calls for in-depth research on the networks between anthropologists and ethnographers in education, on national traditions, their origins, their modes of publication and of creolization.

This paper gives an overview of the surveys published in the Anthropology and Education Quarterly journal. The first part offers an analysis of how the key concepts of culture, identity and language are tackled, how populations are studied and topics dealt with. The researches conducted on schooling, more particularly on the factors behind the achievement or failure of minority populations, the types of schools and the schooling age of pupils take centre stage. Over the last five years AEQ has focused more on compulsory elementary and secondary schooling and on new training places for adults. In a second part researchers are introduced according to four criteria: gender, affiliation, professional status and individual or collective works. The data collection methods, which are mostly qualitative, are tackled in a third part: interviews, (non) participating observation, questionnaires, surveys, conversations, archive documents. More empirical researches based on a multi-method approach have developed over the last five years.

School work is supposed to encourage individual, silent reading focused on the literal signified and oriented toward encyclopaedia-like information. The observations made by the author in primary schools in Mexico show that such is not the case. With reference to Chartier's definition of reading as a cultural practice, her analyses of in-school reading cross the study of the textual materiality in handbooks, the different ways to read texts and understand them with a distinction between individual and collective reading and examine the gap between the ideal reading protocol and the various realities in classrooms. Each reading method can lead to a particular use of the printed material and sometimes increases the gap between what is written and the pupil's own experience of reading. Each method reflects the relations of school with written culture in a sociocultural environment where pupils resort to their own tactics to give sense to texts and use it again in other situations. School culture is influenced by out-of-school social and political processes. Therefore new uses and new meanings of texts can be invented every day and everywhere.

This article is based on the true story of a Chinese teacher who applied an innovative pedagogy in her rural hometown in mainland China following a teacher education programme on the reform of English teaching that she attended. It unfolds the highly complex and often dangerous remaking of ideologies and power relations inherent in pedagogical reform as a microcosm of other concomitant changes in the society at large. It also reflects the inadequacy of teacher education in preparing teachers to survive the micropolitics of the seemingly neutral or beneficial-to-all education reform.

This paper tries to demonstrate why ethnography is a useful methodological approach to examine social practices in their relation to identity. At the methodological level, ethnography is more particularly interested in the everyday life experiences of individuals and attempts to understand better the social practices they fit in. This analysis is made from the declarations of the individuals involved in these practices. That is the reason why the ethnographic approach takes an interest in what the people surveyed have to say. What we have here is a recent ethnographic survey and my objective is to show how relevant such a methodological approach is in the analysis of the relation to identity. This survey examined how the notion of identity takes shape among a group of male and female teenagers at a French-speaking secondary school in Ontario.