Changes In Teacher Education. An Experimentation Through Mediated Cooperative Practices
Author(s):
Patrick Geffard (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
10. Teacher Education Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

10 SES 02 B, Programmes and Approaches: Cooperation and collaboration

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-22
15:15-16:45
Room:
K5.20
Chair:
Paul Cammack

Contribution

The paper originates in the crossing of orientations asserted in the project of reform of Education in France called ‘Law n ° 2013-595 of 8 July 2013 of Orientation and Programming for the Reestablishment of the School of the Republic’ with research and teaching activities conducted in an initial training programme for future teachers.

Within the text of law, the term ‘cooperation’ appears not fewer than 30 times, some sentences showing the importance of the notion connected with the project to ‘reestablish the School of the Republic’. For instance, in the first section, ‘The principles of Education’, the legislator indicates that ‘through its organisation and methods, as well as by the training of the teachers who teach it, the Public Service of Education encourages cooperation between pupils’.

The pedagogical practices presented in the paper began with a Teacher Training Seminar co-organised in the 1990s at the ‘Pädagogische Hoschule’ in Karlsruhe University, Germany. Methods used in the seminar were inspired by the school correspondence (Freinet, 1926) and the institutional pedagogy (Vasquez & Oury, 1967). Since 2011, new practices, also based on cooperation, have been set up, involving fourteen groups of students from Paris 8 and Cergy-Pontoise universities. Groups of future teachers of elementary school were exchanging situation analysis and reflexions with groups of future education advisors (some undergraduate degree students were also involved). Most of the students were in a part-time professional situation, through internships during their training. Cooperative methods and devices have been enriched by more recent works (Imbert, 2005, Laffitte, 2006) and by theoretical elements coming from the ‘psychoanalytically oriented approach in the field of education’ (Blanchard-Laville, Chaussecourte, Hatchuel, Pechberty, 2005).

The research conducted in relation with the training focuses on the effects of the cooperative practices on the evolution of the subjective position of young teachers in the phase of their professional debut. The main concepts at stake, based on the Freudian notion of transference relationship (1937), are the maternal reverie (Bion, 1962), the affect (Green, 2002) and the resonance phenomena (Blanchard-Laville, 2013). Since 2014, the research is influenced by working sessions organised in a network involving five staff of European researchers (Erasmus+ partnership: Institute of Education, London; Università di Milano Biccoca; Université du Luxembourg; Université Paris 8; Université Paris Nanterre). The paper emphasises on how the experience made through the cooperative devices modifies ‘the subjective appropriation of the professional position’.

More recently, new developments emerged, both in training and research. After a particular experience lived in a seminar made in close proximity (in time and geographically) with the Paris attacks in November 2015, two new themes appeared: the importance of the use of narration (Benjamin, 1936) and the fact that the subjective position of who leads the seminar is also strongly affected by the cooperative devices put in use.

The paper will put emphasis on those two dimensions and will end on a reflexion about what appears to be some kind of a paradoxical situation. If, as previously mentioned, the Official texts emphasize the interest of the cooperation, teachers in their professional debuts tend to receive that prescription as an injunction hard to put in practice. Practices of cooperation seem to be much more within reach when they have been experienced through devices working as diffracted mediations (Geffard, 2015). In another vein, academics involved in such practices and research may participate to working sessions with authorities in charge of the evolution of school orientations. A work which could be marked by ambivalence in its results, because potentially carrying, through the texts produced, the dimension of the injunction causing difficulties for the teachers in training.

Method

The research material consists in documents exchanged between the future professionals in training (i.e. analysis of the educational situations encountered), individual validation files containing personal reflexions on what had been engaged during the seminar in matter of subjective involvement, and some documents produced in the seminars (e.g. notes of the secretariat of the cooperative council). For the academic years 2015–2016, the materials collected were reread and analysed during the semester following the seminars, within a workshop held in May at Karlsruhe University (Germany), in the context of an Erasmus contract between this university and Paris 8 university. The workshop mainly involved G. Schlemminger (Professor, Karlsruhe), A. Dubois (Senior Lecturer, Cergy-Pontoise) and the author of the proposal. In a second time, part of the works produced in the workshop has been shared with colleagues of the Institute of Education (University of London) in the aim to engage further discussions on what had been put at work in those seminars set up according to a cooperative approach. The main research issue is an attempt to enlighten the way experiments bearing contradictions between official prescriptions and what is experienced in the presence of pupils during the part-time professional practice can be thought and elaborated through the work made within the various cooperative devices. This research is in line with approaches of psychoanalytic orientation in education considering that the taking into account of singular subjectivity carries a strong heuristic power (Gavarini, 2013). Research in which ‘The singular acquires scientific value when it ceases to be regarded as a spectacular variety and accesses to the status of exemplary variation’ (Canguilhem, 1970, p. 219). And because most of the work made in the seminar implicates group activities, the writing produced by the students is read and analysed in connection with the concept of Balint function (Delion, 2007), which helps to understand productions always realised in a context where students ‘experience the tension between the wish to join together and the wish to be separate’ (Stokes, 1994). Finally, it should be mentioned that the research also takes into account the subjectivity of the researcher himself, considering it’s a way to reach specific heuristics capabilities hardly achievable by other means and, therefore, we have to examine ‘the subjectivity inherent in any observation by considering it as the royal road to true objectivity rather than fictitious’ (Devereux, 1967, p. 16).

Expected Outcomes

Even if the research is still in progress, the paper will exhibit the first findings. In connection with the experiment of cooperative practices and from the uncertainties arising in the professional situations, we propose to understood what emerges in the activities carried out in the seminar according to what R. Sennett calls a 'reconfiguration activity', in which the participants ‘turn things in their heads’ and transform both the ends and the operations of what they are working on. An activity in which ‘reconfiguration is the most radical kind of repair’ (Sennett, 2012, p. 214). The work undertaken with students is also understood as 'co-thought process' in the sense of D. Widlöcher (1996), as a co-construction of meaning permitted by a shared psychic work between the students in their working groups, between the students and the leaders of the seminars, and, during the research work, between the researchers analysing the materials produced. From the last developments encountered in the experimentation, part of the research will now have to focus on the subjective changes occurring on the side of who lead the seminars, in the aim to participate to improvements and innovations at stake in higher education. Some of the results produced by the early stages of the research are now being resumed in order to be worked on, in the project of a publication directed by the organisers of the workshop held in Karlsruhe in 2015, publication for which fifteen authors, essentially French and Belgian, have already proposed a contribution. Alongside this publication to come, some of the researchers involved in the use of institutional pedagogy in higher education are now working on a forthcoming international network called International Institutional Pedagogy for which colleagues of Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Brazil and France have confirmed their wish to participate.

References

Benjamin, W. (1936/2001). Le conteur. Considérations sur l’œuvre de Nicolas Leskov. Dans Expérience et pauvreté (p. 51-106). Paris : Payot & Rivages. Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London : Karnac. Blanchard-Laville, C. (2013). Au risque d’enseigner. Paris : PUF. Blanchard-Laville C., Chaussecourte P., Hatchuel F., Pechberty B. (2005). Recherches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique dans le champ de l’éducation et de la formation. Revue française de pédagogie, 151, 111-162. Canguilhem, G. (1970), Du singulier et de la singularité en épistémologie biologique. Paris : Vrin. Delion, P. (2007). La fonction Balint. Sa place dans l’enseignement et dans la formation psychothérapique et son effet porteur dans la relation soignants-soignés. Vie sociale et traitements, 95, 48-52. Devereux, G. (1967/1980). De l’angoisse à la méthode dans les sciences du comportement. Paris : Aubier-Flammarion. Freinet, C. (1964). Les techniques Freinet de l’École moderne. Paris : Armand Colin. Freud, S. (1937). Konstruktionen in der Analyse, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, GW, XVI, 23/4, 459-469. Gavarini, L. (2013). Les approches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique en Sciences de l’éducation. Communication dans le symposium Réflexions épistémologiques actuelles à propos des recherches cliniques d’orientation psychanalytique en sciences de l’éducation, Congrès international d’actualité de la recherche en éducation et formation, AREF, Montpellier. Geffard, P. (2016). Un dispositivo di elaborazione dell’esperienza emozionale in situazioni professionali, Pedagogia Oggi, 1, 169-179. Geffard, P. (2015). L’écriture monographique et la correspondance comme dispositifs groupaux d’élaboration de pratiques enseignantes débutantes. Colloque Condition(s) enseignante(s), conditions pour enseigner. Réalités, enjeux, défis. Université L. Lumière, Lyon. Green, A. (2002). Idées directrices pour une psychanalyse contemporaine. Paris : PUF. Imbert, F. (2005). L’inconscient dans la classe : Transferts et contre-transferts. Paris : ESF. Journal Officiel de la République Française (2013), Loi n° 2013-595 du 8 juillet 2013 d’orientation et de programmation pour la refondation de l’école de la République, 0157, 11379. Laffitte René & VPI (2006). Essais de pédagogie institutionnelle. Nîmes : Champ social. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris : Le Seuil. Oury, F. et Vasquez, A. (1967/1998). Vers une pédagogie institutionnelle. Nîmes : Champ social. Schlemminger, G. (2016). De Célestin Freinet aux pédagogies institutionnelles, Saarbrücken : Éditions universitaires européennes. Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Stokes, J. (1994). Problems in multidisciplinary teams: the unconscious at work. Journal of Social Work Practice, 8/2, 161–167. Widlöcher, D. (1996). Les nouvelles cartes de la psychanalyse. Paris : Odile Jacob.

Author Information

Patrick Geffard (presenting / submitting)
Université Paris 8
Sciences de l'éducation
Paris

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