Contenu du sommaire

This paper, in looking at the Cartel of the Left as a significant episode in the history of education in France, has two goals. The first is to give back to school issues the importance they had at a time now remembered mainly for its economic and international stakes. The second is to show how the French right took hold of educational issues and evolved more detailed doctrines in that field, which tends to be studied in its relationship to the political Left. The bibliography concerning political and educational evolution is complemented with readings from the press and from the archives of men and political parties on the Right, and shows that the Cartel episode, however slight, had the effect of forcing the Right to rethink its positions regarding public school and the laws on laicity. From the Royalists through to moderate Republicans, competition developed in particular in order to capture the Catholic vote.

This contemporary history paper analyses the impact of the Faure law of 1968 on the funding of university research. This law is at the root of the transfer of the distribution of funds by the Ministry, faculty through faculty, to a distribution to individual universities, but also marks the beginning of the gradual inclusion of qualitative criteria within this process, as opposed to previously purely quantitative ones. The focus is first of all on the variety of ways in which universities have complied with the Faure law regarding research funding. The focus is then on showing how and at what cost some of the universities amongst those created after the Faure law started, as early as the beginning of the 1970s, elaborating independent research policies. Documentary sources come from the Paris VII, Rennes I and Picardie universities, from the CPU (Conférence des presidents d'université or Conference of university presidents), the CNESER (Conseil national supérieur de l'enseignement et de la recherche or National council on teaching and research) and the Ministries for higher education and research during the given period.

This paper takes a look at the changes in the social origin of students recruited to the officer schools of the Merchant Marines between 1965 and 2011. Given the changes in maritime employment and training, and the evolution in access to secondary and higher education, the point is to study how the socio-demographic profiles of future sailors have evolved towards greater social openness or on the contrary towards social closure in the recruitment of officers. The main corpus is the comparison of two enquiries undertaken by questionnaire, one in 1982 (Paradeise, 1985), the other in 2008 (Grövel, 2013).

At the intersection between the sociology of education, of institutions and of work, this paper shows how, independently of official institutional expectations, following the news is integrated into the tasks incumbent upon history-geography teachers in high school. The focus is on the understanding of the social expectations which engender these tasks and make them both possible and acceptable. A comprehensive methodology leads to insisting on the perception of vague institutional expectations and the desire to be worthy of them because of a combination of professional, disciplinary and personal dispositions. Accepting the tasks results from conforming to a professional role and identity, which in return give the tasks meaning. Ultimately, at the margins of the main professorial activities, tasks inseparable from the interiorization of what it is to be a good history and geography teacher assert themselves.

Following initiatives from the DEPP (Direction de l'évaluation, de la prospective et de la performance) and the CNESCO (Conseil national d'évaluation du système scolaire) on the attractiveness of teaching as a profession, this paper focuses on analysing the gendered structure of PE teacher recruitment since their inclusion within the Ministry of Education in 1981. The goal is to understand the passage from same sex to co-ed recruitment in the light of candidacies, their relative successes, and the discourse on the changes in the recruitment contests. During the 1980s, PE education is a school discipline where the balance between the sexes is insured by separate recruitment contests for men and women. After 1989 when a single contest was instated, both candidacies and recruitment changed a great deal, corresponding to the trends apparent all over secondary school recruitment but also showing the establishment of a sexual division of the profession. Given the recent and steadily growing masculinisation of PE teachers, this analysis recalls the principle of equality and suggests explanations for the diminishment of the number of female candidates for the position of PE teacher.

Kindergarten, even if it purports to deal with the specificities of early life, has increasingly been turning towards primary school, in particular where its evaluation methods are concerned. By seeking out learning difficulties as precociously as possible, in order to lower rates of school failure, it contributes, through its evaluation practices, to the production of very diverse school experiences. This paper aims to understand how children experience these practices, and how they manage a school environment which does not always mirror positive images of themselves. The empirical corpus which has been given priority here consists in semi-directive interviews. Our results show that as soon as their schooling starts, school status influences the behaviour of children, in particular regarding the way they will strive to preserve self-esteem or advertise satisfaction with the status of top student.

This paper is a clinical case study centred on an early childhood day-care centre in order to bring to light what the stakes in teamwork are in this field, characterised by a great variety of professions and by far-reaching changes within these professions. The centre is analysed both in terms of the theoretical inputs informing professional practices as well as in terms of the tensions running through the institution. This paper makes use of and departs from two concepts, those of “contenance” and of “contention” developed by Denis Mellier in his work, based on psychoanalytic theory, on the psychic life of teams working in nursery schools (Mellier, 2000/2014), to consider the strongly subjective positions with little relation to the team which allow practitioners to concentrate on the children rather than on relationships within the team.

This study focuses on the cognitive development of the notion of age in children aged 6 to 12 presenting an intellectual deficit. These subjects'acquisitions are compared to those of subjects in the general population. The issues are: do these acquisitions follow the same chronology in all subjects? Do they occur at the same time or with a gap? Do the mechanisms identified by Jamet, Es-Saïdi and Ducret (2010) also occur in intellectually deficient children? 144 children from a Local Unit for School Inclusion (ULIS in French) were questioned using the questionnaire developed by Jamet et al. (2010). The results indicate that the notion of age is acquired through a developmental process for both types of children. However, deficient children acquire it more slowly. The model from the Jamet et al. paper (2010) explains the deficient children's performance for 80,7 % of cases. But this population also follows a development model which does not exist among non-deficient children. Pedagogical suggestions follow from the study.

This paper purposes to show that even a policy which is uncontested will have different meanings when applied internationally or nationally, giving rise to different types of “locally situated micro-policies”. This finding is based on the results of a case study in Rwanda, in six schools “for all”. Its concrete examples show that the same policy of promoting basic education for all in Rwanda has led to the creation of very different schools with very different characteristics even as agents in the field were supposed to be using the same frame of reference. Form a theoretical point of view, these results suggest that the development of public policy does not stop with the promulgation of an official document but is recreated daily through the agency of a variety of different agents at different levels.

This synthesis focuses on quality assurance in higher education, in particular in European university education. It first focuses on the history of quality assurance since its inception in the United States in the mid 1980s. It then presents the descriptive and prescriptive literature in use by public policies. Finally, it summarizes the findings of the studies that have looked at the transformations wrought in universities by the development of quality assurance: changes in university missions, in relationships between institutions, and, on the one hand, political power, on the other, students, governance and organisation within institutions of higher education, and professional identities.