Contenu du sommaire : Questions socialement vives : quelles approches possibles en milieu scolaire ?

Socially acute questions (religion, sexuality, environment…) are presently entering schools, starting debates and putting in question the development of young people into citizens. If research regarding teachers is abundant in this regard, the situation of the educational counsellors has not been explored. These agents can within the scope of their missions have difficulties in making choices, in going beyond purely normative attitudes and in using these issues in order to promote the development of their pupils into autonomous individuals and citizens. How can knowledge and values dovetail without training in these areas? How best to communicate in order to ensure their transmission? How can pupils be engaged by these issues and what modalities are best used to promote engagement? This clinical study focuses on the projects of CPE interns in different INSPE (Institut national supérieur du professorat et de l'éducation or National higher institutes for teaching and education) regarding SAQs: understanding of the issues at stake, educational goals, educational leverage, but also apprehensions, difficulties, and how to go beyond them.

Sports and physical education can potentially see emerging during its enactment socially acute questions according to the definitions given by Simonneaux or Legardez. Thinking about health education according to the modalities of « éducation à » or « education towards » and socially acute questions can put in question the relationship between sports and physical education and health education. This is the context for the focus of this paper on the way young PE teachers in internships assert their appropriation of health education issues within PE. How do they see themselves enabling this objective and working it into their disciplinary routine while giving it its full weight? What difficulties do they encounter? Are they even conscious of the potentially acute nature of health education issues and of the problems it raises? On the basis of interviews with a variety of interns, this paper explores these questions and endeavours to sketch out some ideas enabling the inclusion of health education in physical education.

At school, the issue of neutrality is usually heard as pertaining to religion and politics. But is it not more widely pertinent to any issue concerning daily life and society? Is it not an issue in any field being taught which has potential consequences on individual behaviour, and which the French language designates in its schools by saying it « teaches towards » – « éducation à l'alimentation, à la santé… »? This paper focuses on « education towards eating » where a risk arises regarding neutrality as soon as, through the introduction of models and slogans prescribing good eating habits, choices are promoted that are rarely put in question by pupils or their families. It shows that schools transmit slogans and models that they have difficulty putting into perspective. It highlights the importance of getting pupils to develop critical thinking through the acquisition of extraordinary reasoning tools enabling them to argue choices in the manner of eating according to social contexts.

Beyond the recognition of its school and social importance, environmental and sustainable development education greatly challenges teachers. However, not much research has been conducted concerning these issues among elementary school teacher interns who have passed the entrance contests to the profession. This study uses a corpus consisting of more than 398000 words originating in the Master's essays of students from eleven French regional educational divisions (académies) who have shown an interest in the teaching of environmental and sustainable development issues. A lexicometric analysis shows six groups of meaning representing the dominant ideas and themes in the corpus. The study shows that the word pupil is central to all these papers, as well as the focus on developing ecological habits and on institutional recommendations rather than critical thinking, which seems largely absent. This study can thus provide recommendations in order to train elementary school teachers in accordance with the directive ordering the generalisation of education in sustainable development – EDD (MENJ, 2019).

This paper aims at analysing social science training using the insights developed through empirical studies in controversial issues in class – « controversial public issues » or « socially acute questions » (SAC). The paper synthetises work on the debating intentions of teaching social sciences using SAQ and on the effects expected on pupils. It then describes, analyses and applies critical thinking to a class in Quebec in secondary schools centred on « the social universe », to whit the class in financial education, as a case study in the prescriptions and curricular content obstructing a deliberative treatment of SAQs in class.

Since the 1970s a heterogeneous group of non-disciplinary topics for education has emerged, such as health education, environmental education, sustainable development education… The institution defines them as transversal topics and since 2013 they are called « parcours éducatifs » or educational journeys. The notion of education involves that of the subject as a whole, with his/her affective, ethical, political and cognitive dimensions, and that of education's capacity to empower. The preposition « à" is usually a fig-leaf for “pour” or “for” such and such an international institutional. To put in question these different “éducations à” is to think about the relationship to knowledge and to its legitimacy, and rethink school disciplines and their didacticism. Such questioning then abuts on the issues or questions called “socially acute”. This paper studies in succession the emergence and the specific characteristics of both these fields in order to compare them, take stock of their convergence, and try to see beyond them.

This exploratory paper focuses on taking in account PE teachers' discourses as a tool of analysis but also as a means of professional development. It analyses what teachers say about the criteria guiding their choices when they enact motor and social roles in Physical education. The analysis of the responses to an on-line questionnaire shows that using the roles explicitly is massive and that certain variables seem to modify their use. Expertise in the various APSA (Activités sportives, physiques et artistiques, the eight disciplinary fields into which PE is divided), and the type of recruitment contest passed by the teacher, have a strong impact on the discourse of the teachers in this group. Whether in the declaration of the use of autonomy in the role, or in the use of variables to optimise acquisitions in these roles, the questionnaire indicates that the teacher's professional development impacts his or her discourse. In the context of research in professional development (professional didacticism), this questionnaire thus seems susceptible if becoming a useful tool to help in constructing professional models for the lucid enactment of roles in PE.

This paper aims at identifying de way groups are constituted among French pupils in physical and sports education when operational and functional efficacy is privileged. The idea is to compare such situations, which are very goal-oriented, with situations where processes for socio-affective cohesion are privileged and research shows that pupils choose to be with their own sex, to see whether choices will be identical. Using sociometrical questionnaires (n = 291) and interviews (n = 40) we questioned pupils from age 11 to age 15. The sociograms show that with this type of cohesion, sexual logics stay predominant, but the interviews show differences between the sexes: the boys choose according to prestige, the girls according to affinity.

This paper focuses on the case of Irène. A Cycle 2 (Key Stage 1) teacher in primary school, Irène is faced with the difficulties of one of her pupils, Sally. Sally has normal intelligence and no learning deficit has been diagnosed. But Sally is still not reading. What are Irène's reactions to this difficulty? What does this impossibility in Sally provoke in Irène? During Irène's clinical interview, we are struck by the fact that this teacher seems to focus on her pupils' physical behaviour rather than on Sally's difficulties. Within education sciences, clinical didacticism centres on the subject and can, because it is open to a psychoanalytical approach, suggest other ways of understanding the didactic situation. In this case, at a point where didacticism has reached its limits and struggles to explain Sally's difficulties, clinical didacticism, using among other tools Lacan's analysis of the master's discourse and his concept of the plus-de-jouïr, provides a different vision of Irène's position as a teacher, which leads to developments concerning the training of primary school teachers.

Pursuing a body of work that has already shown that the appropriations of cultural objects and practices that do not conform to the expectations of the people responsible for putting in place artistic and cultural education are not infrequent, in particular with adolescent populations from underprivileged environments, this paper focuses on the actual appropriations of the plays seen by children participating in a programme of education in children's theatre. After showing that the children give meaning to the plays they are shown according to a pragmatic and ethical point of view very distant from the formal and aesthetic responses expected of them within the programme, we investigate the causes of these responses. We show that the programme itself has difficulties transmitting, to children who do not already have an aesthetic and formal disposition, this way of apprehending a play, and even has difficulties activating this way of apprehending plays in children who do have such a disposition.

This paper focuses on anticipating the obstacles to staff meetings taking place according to plan in three French primary schools. Seven meetings were recorded by school principals with the authorisation of the teachers. In the context of exploring the didacticism of the teaching professions, we try to understand the issues at stake in the debates involved in these meetings by analysing how each meeting's collective discourse is structured (Plantin's theory of argumentation). The analysis takes in account each school's context, the space devoted to certain themes at these meetings, the status of the different participants (director, teacher with or without experience), and each participant's conception of their profession. This analysis shows the unexpected complexity of everything that can interrupt these meetings' expected flow.

The issue of the space awarded school age children agitated French society in the aftermath of the event of may 1968, in particular on television, a medium at that point developing quickly to the point of hegemony. This paper aims at analysing the position of pupils' speech on television in comparison with that of adults, and in particular the degree of autonomy attributed it, or, on the contrary, the degree to which it is instrumented. On the basis of 52 broadcasts on French TV from 1967 to 1983, originating in the INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel or national audio-visual institute) ‘s collection and seen at Paris'Inathèque, this study shows how television tried to mediate between school age youth and their professors during the 1970s, before another stage in the recognition of the legitimacy of pupils' speech emerged at the beginning if the 1980s.

In the context of the struggle against academic failure, this study, conducted in Beirut and Paris with a mixed methodology using direct and indirect observation as well as questionnaires and focus groups, shows that, to succeed academically, a significant portion of the 602 middle school pupils consulted expect a holistic approach that takes in account their personal development. Furthermore, the pupils under study list the attitudes on the part of educational agents they consider beneficial and put others in question as detrimental to their progress. In this context, do school life services play their role fully and is personal development sufficiently taken in account? The official texts defining these services, which promote greater cooperation between teachers and school life officers, as well as the paradigms represented by ecology and complexity, can enable the necessary changes. Furthermore, the research highlights the fact that the departitioning of school life services observed by young Lebanese pupils encourages a more favourable attitude towards these services than in their French counterparts. The study thus recommends promoting school life services to the point of fusing them with teaching and adapting the pedagogical practices of both systems.

This synthesis of different personal studies is grounded in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, in particular in the studies published in L'Amour de l'art – The Love of Art: European Museums and their Public (1991). But rather than offer a theory of cultural dissemination, it focuses on the professionalisation of socio-cultural facilitation that has developed since the 1960s. To focus on the « small » socio-educational world of sociocultural facilitation and people's education is an invitation to be attentive to « small » significant differences. The point is, on the one hand, to study the new socio-educational professions at the margin of the school universe. On the other, to explore the role of leisure activities in the construction of the academic success and feeling of citizenship of children and young people. Taking this dimension into account serves as a reminder that there is more to education than the learning of academic disciplines. It revitalises issues concerning the reproductive role of schools since non-teaching professions are now invested in different modalities of « cultural catch-up ».