Contenu du sommaire : Le conseiller principal d'éducation entre héritage et nouvelles professionnalités

The Archives reveal the historical portrait of the head proctor to be a great deal more nuanced than the caricature this school figure of the 19th and 20th century has left in its wake. An historical analysis based on the confrontation of sources (career files, official texts, testimonials, professional journals…) has enabled us to define the missions, the institutional expectations and the socio-professional characteristics of the head supervisor of a school. S/ he had to be a “solid disciplinarian” executing orders. S/he serves as a warrant for an education understood as a closing in and a closing down - education as enclosure. His or her career is an obstacle course towards the Holy Grail of a posting in Paris. The 1950s and 1960s, scene of a profound evolution in society at large and in its educational system, are the years that bred the Conseiller principal d'éducation or Senior educational counsellor. The change in name singles out a rupture that hides a somewhat more complex professional reality for this new school professional. The dregs of our historical inheritance have not always allowed him or her to control and conceive of his / her activity.

The senior educational counsellor's activity in response to pupils' needs takes place within an institution characterised in secondary schools by a division of the labour involved in education. His or her counselling activities are studied in this paper in terms of their collective dimension, that is in terms of the system of relationships functioning within the educational team whatever the representations people may have because of the normative expectations of the educational community. The paper takes a comprehensive approach to listening to the different agents in the system, in order to highlight the interaction of the CPE-pupil relationship with its environment. The qualitative analysis of interviews with professionals regarding the way they counsel and follow their pupils' developments was complemented with the administration and analysis of a confirmatory questionnaire. It transpires that the relationship with the pupil evolves according to the pedagogical time frame and allows new opportunities to emerge within the institution. The emergence of modes of cooperation between the different agents in the institution indicates a need to go beyond the modelisation of the tensions between individual and collective work in the institution.

This paper, pertaining to the education sciences and using a psycho-sociological methodology, addresses the profession of Conseiller principal d'éducation, or senior educational counsellor. A structural approach is used to understand the existence of a consensual professional representation of the profession, detailing its content and its internal organisation. Given the variety of practices and a confused professional identity, what we have been able to highlight as the core of the profession, both central and normative, is counselling and listening. Functional and circumstantial elements for their part refer to an administrative and disciplinary representation of the job as well as to an ethical and reflexive one. It is listening skills, according to the analysis in similarities, which federates the representatives of the profession around an organisational and reflexive order linked to counselling and educational values, and around a sphere of action linked to adaptability and availability.

A French specificity, the job of the CPE – the Senior educational counsellor in a school - is all the more difficult to explain to foreign partners since formulating a definition of the profession encounters a number of obstacles. In order to reduce these obstacles, this paper has engaged in a number of interviews with practitioners so as to fill out our understanding of the difference between the job definition and its reality in the field. There are some initial results to this field enquiry and its open interviews, focused on the plurality of the conceptions and practices of different practitioners. Ethical distortions appear to be at the heart of the intense experiences these CPEs communicate, especially in suburban schools.

This paper focuses on the social representations of the professions of Conseiller principal d'éducation and Secondary school teacher, within the context of the division of labour instituted in secondary schools, among students in their first year of a Master's degree. Our corpus is a survey through a questionnaire administered upon entering initial training in the academic territories of Aix-Marseille, Lille, Nantes and Rennes. The results highlight the paradoxical finding that the CPE, if s/he is no longer perceived to be a head supervisor or proctor, is nonetheless identified as the law and order expert despite an evolution in recognition for the profession, in particular for its role in guiding the development of pupils and that of managing the supervisory team in the school. The definitions of the jobs more or less converge but the projection onto the professional field indicates that collaborative work is an idea either rarely shared, or rarely imagined.

Personal talks with parents are said to be a tool enabling the negotiation of the terms according to which education can be shared between parents and school, but in practice they stay a tool used by education professionals to procure, through various strategies, the adhesion of a parent to their proposals. Given the role of mediator played by Senior education counsellors (CPE or Conseiller principal d'éducation) in Middle schools, Vinatier's methodology in professional didacticism enables us to focus on the specificities of verbal interactions between counsellor and parents, in situations where a child has broken the rules. A transverse analysis of 95 recorded interviews between parents and ten counsellors in the state school system reveals their nature: to inform, and to reboot and/or monitor a pupil's behaviour. The majority of parents in these interviews cooperate. Counsellors usually keep to a high position in these dialogues, but nonetheless a large number of cases seem more symmetrical: when parents either contest, confide, and/or especially when an alliance between adults establishes itself. These interview situations seem to constitute a specific category of situation for which different counsellors have developed action schemes enabling them to negotiate the different issues at stake.

This paper focuses on evaluating the effects of a training sequence centred on self-representation with the goal of promoting the investment of teenagers in the development of projects for their future. Writing is considered to be a tool of mediation in narrative self-construction, and aims at a process of individuation and reinforcement of personal narcissism through the group. The sessions took place with 108 pupils enrolled in Quatrième (Year 9) in a school from an underprivileged area. Its effects were evaluated by analysing the contents of the written productions and through a questionnaire evaluating the evolution of the teenagers' self-esteem and the quality of their career projects. The results take school achievement levels into account and show a significant impact on teenage ambition. They encourage approaches to career counselling that show creativity in their modes of intervention.

This paper focuses on teamwork in the context of language teaching. The case study is based on a network mutualising resources within the Rennes académie (French territorial subdivision for education). The theoretical framework is that of a documentary approach to didacticism in order to bring to light the impact of collective work on individual teacher professional development. We have developed a qualitative method suited to analysing the meetings we have observed. We complement these data with interviews focused on certain teachers. Our first results highlight that participation in collective work gives momentum to a teachers resource system when s/he mobilises, in class, resources from the collective system. The link between the two resource sourcing systems, collective and individual, promotes the development of new documents, in particular new documents with a digital aspect.

A great deal of research never ceases to show that the variety of experiences novice teachers go through during the different stages of their training stay unarticulated, “unthought”, and that their repercussions in terms of contributing to their professional competencies stay weak. This paper grounds itself in a research project in cultural anthropology in order to look at the benefits of a specific early training scheme to the capacity novice teachers have in using their university experience as they teach in their respective schools. The results show that this organisation allowed the novices to invest in a process known as “experiential sub-stratification” and thus build up their capacity to teach. The paper concludes with proposals for the modernisation of the teaching of pedagogy at university.

This paper describes preliminary research conducted by a group of trainers who wanted to better train future primary school teachers in the teaching of physical activities to kindergarten pupils. It belongs to the field of professional didacticism. It focuses on analysing the activity of two experienced teachers in order to tease out the models they are dependent on, and/or the stable and organised aspects of their activity. Each teacher was observed during a dance session followed by a feed-back interview. The results indicate the objectives and principles held to be true that give direction and guidance to their activities in four types of situation. They enable the paper to highlight the knowledge and professional interventions that need to be prioritised for appropriation by beginners and stress the importance of among other things: body language; physical implication; indication of care and attention; interventions to manage transitions.

Within the context of a Franco-swiss research project looking from the perspective of a variety of disciplines at the ways in which primary school teachers evaluate work in Maths and Sciences, this paper describes the results of exploratory research with a primary school teacher in the Paris area. Working within the theoretical and methodological frameworks of clinical psychoanalysis and mathematical didactics, we have tried to understand how the teacher evaluates her pupils. We wonder during a specific evaluation led by the teacher how the link between on the one hand didactic data and on the other the imagination linked to these data is effected, this link being what can bring to light her professional and didactic judgment as it works during an evaluation. The results show how a set of representations and fantasies originating in the teacher, coupled with insufficient didactic mastery, is actualised during the evaluative sequences. The combination of these two phenomena is then shown to be susceptible to increasing the difficulties in mathematics of some of the students in the class.

Since the 19th century, Catholic secondary schools in Brittany have demonstrated exceptional vitality, the reason for which can be highlighted through a new approach grounded in the serialisation of memos concerning the history of those institutions which have become lycées, high schools preparing for university entrance examinations. Until the 60s, their dynamism is based mainly on the singular position occupied by the clergy in society, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The fall in vocations did not modify its attractivity, whose second explanation is in its reputation for excellence, inherited from the clerical experience. But the success of Catholic secondary schools is also due to their institutional nimbleness, which allows them to adapt quickly to expectations, whether in rich city centres or in rural settings. To sum up the situation: private schools were attractive because they were catholic, and catholic schools are attractive because they have the freedom to adapt.

This paper proposes to reflect upon the role of associations in modern democracies, more specifically in order to think about the education taking place within their ranks. From Tocqueville to today, the link between individualism and freedom of association has been thought through. How can the primacy of consent for any link to be forged be reconciled with the educational project – where one chooses neither parents nor, or to a very limited degree, one's teachers and fellow pupils? How can different educational loci and agents concur in developing autonomous individuals? The political philosophy of education can clarify matters. In locating itself within Marcel Gauchet's theoretical framework for his wide-ranging studies on the gradual deployment of the principle of legitimate individualism during the centuries of modernity, this paper will argue that any thinking regarding the conditions necessary for education (in particular that of one of them, authority) will be enriched by the following considerations: 1) the analysis of the kind of articulation between individual and collective that associations represent 2) the point of view of a complementarity between the legitimacy of various educational loci and agents, associations included 3) the examination of the relations of authority that can develop within associations.

Traditionally, entering the merchant marines involved a “calling”. This idea regarding entering the profession continues to be operational among a majority of those concerned and tends to hide the social reproduction mechanisms at the heart of the profession. Little known and ridden with obligations, the job requires more now than ever a certain number of specific social characteristics. This paper, based on a study of student officers in the Merchant Marine including a questionnaire and interviews, focuses on identifying the social conditions enabling the development of the dispositions necessary to the adoption of the profession, and looks closely at the modes of socialisation that lead to the reproduction of the profession of merchant mariner. It transpires that to become an officer in the Merchant Marines it is necessary to have acquired or inherited a certain number of dispositions during a first stage of socialisation, or in anticipation of a professionalisation.