Contenu du sommaire : L'école au temps des tutos

The rise of digital technology is raising questions regarding education and schools. This Report contributes to the debate by analysing the use of online amateur videos to disseminate knowledge or for skills training. What role do these media play in learning? How do they relate to studies, teachers and the school form? Whilst there has been a spectacular production and consumption of online videos since the creation of YouTube in 2005, research has focused more on the video-makers rather than their uses and more on online courses than on the scientific YouTubers' productions. Nevertheless, a 2019 survey by the INJEP ?French National Institute of Youth and Popular Education? revealed that most of the young people questioned gave more credence to what is being taught at school than to YouTube videos. Therefore, we should not be thinking in terms of substitute spaces, but rather looking at how online resources are challenging the school system and the school form. In the age of tutorials, schools are having to come to terms with a youth-based digital experience that blurs the boundaries between games and areas of knowledge, giving rise to a desire to learn, which is sometimes combined with regret about not having learnt or not having learnt well. It is also leading the debate on the democratisation of education and culture towards the new research pathways which this Report aims to explore.

This Article explores the use of You
Tube videos by secondary school pupils. Through group interviews, the study shows that secondary school pupils regularly consult certain YouTube channels to clarify, expand on or to memorise concepts seen in class and frames the criteria they use to validate content. The impact of such use is discussed in the context of pupils' relationship with their school.

Is learning online perceived as easier than learning at school? This is the question posed here, from the angle of the Internet consumption of independent videos popularising culture and science and in relation to a population of Internet users; individuals who have had a short education. The fieldwork is based on 19 semi-structured interviews with Internet users aged between 17 and 43, who have at least passed the baccalaureate. Video-based learning offers a way around the obstacle of the written word, by taking the mystery out of complex words and providing access to knowledge through the act of doing. That they are watched alone, with the option of pressing replay and pause buttons, means that respondents can progress at their own pace, choosing their preferred areas of interest. This à la carte schooling leads to the acquisition of fragmented and relatively unstable knowledge, which calls into question learning dimensions and leads to an interest in the ambiguous relationship that the respondents weave between school and knowledge and their strong demand for personalised education.

In this interview, Prem Carriou, who wrote his thesis about the popularisation of history on You
Tube between 2008 and 2018, demonstrates the spectacular growth of these channels in France over the period studied. He analyses the profile of the YouTubers and highlights the high proportion of men who have graduated from higher education, of which only a third studied history, something that is barely apparent in the content of the videos. Finally, he analyses the way in which video-makers work and the type of relationship they have with their audience.

This interview offers a historical and epistemological reflection on the use of history videos on You
Tube. Beyond some of the specific features of these new digital media, indicators of a new sociology of communication and media, the knowledge historian highlights long-term phenomena such as the major role of mediators or even the challenges and the place accorded to investigation and truth, the administration of evidence and the political uses of history. The huge diversity of history on YouTube is of very uneven quality. The social impact of these types of videos cannot be ignored, nor the democratic issues they raise, nor the possible strategies for manipulating discourse regarding the past, between entertainment and the justification of certain readings of current events. The long history of knowledge within educational sciences also sheds light on and rethinks a new relationship regarding the time of knowledge and of learning in schools and universities, justifying the urgent need for a critical and enlightened education in these knowledge media.

This Article describes the use of Internet videos in the sporting activities of children and adolescents living in rural areas, based on the ethnography of a village. Does the use of videos to learn, train or improve a sport lead to becoming autonomous? An analysis of several sports carried out by young people aged between 6 and 18, including sports at home during the 2020 lockdown, highlights that digital technology-based autonomy does not affect all sports in the same way; gymnastics and boardsports stand out in the intensive use of videos—consumed and produced by young people—for learning and developing skills, while team sports and intergenerational leisure activities rarely use video as a learning medium.

Since the early 2000s, the possibilities offered by digital video have developed considerably. The skills associated with producing and sharing videos, which are mostly acquired privately outside of traditional academic spaces, are now playing an increasingly important role in social and democratic life, by directing, editing or sharing them via dedicated platforms. In order to shed light on how these skills are appropriated, a series of interviews with female humanities and social sciences undergraduates were carried out. The production and sharing of videos by these young adults seem to fulfil three objectives: shared memories, expressing creativity and developing pre-professional skills. This complex learning process is largely self-taught, relying on tutorials and the reproduction of popular formats. It is also co-constructed with peers, by taking into account comments generated by the videos they share, in ways that are partly linked to the gendered construction of self-presentation on digital social media.

This Article presents the results of research carried out in a secondary school in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation during the health crisis, which observed on a small scale the consequences of abolishing repeating a year in favour of automatic promotion. The results show that weaker pupils who would probably have repeated a year worried about future academic difficulties and sometimes regret not having repeated a year to improve their skills. On the other hand, average and good pupils, although less directly concerned, emphasised the negative impact on the atmosphere in classes and the additional workload generated by the presence of pupils with difficulties. They also questioned the fairness of automatic promotion, highlighting a feeling of injustice and a breach of the implicit moral contract based on merit and hard work. In so doing, the Article highlights and discusses the latent moral function of repeating a year, which affects all pupils and class dynamics.

A collective research dynamic centred on the concept and theory of the school form was established in 1975 within the Groupe de recherche sur la socialisation ?Research Group on Socialisation? (GRS) and continued until 2002. A group of researchers trained by Guy Vincent and three generations of his students stabilised, but also deep dived, complexified and renewed the questions and conceptualisation methods already present in l'École Primaire ?the Primary School?. Focusing successively on three concepts that are at the heart of the theory of the school form—pedagogy, discipline and the school mode of socialisation—this Article shows how their work helped to open up the sociology of education to issues of socialisation, knowledge, the working classes. Under their impact, the subject of the sociology of education became less that of the school itself but rather the determining place which is occupied by the school learning mode and socialisation in our society, and its consequences for the processes by which both individual and social inequalities are constructed.