This work started from two initial observations: (I) as a professor of biology for young students in a Parisian Faculty of Medicine since a long time, I have been always surprised by the low (let’s say the very low) level of their understanding of the living world; (ii) as an MD, I have been astonished, during the recent pandemic and social crisis in Europe and in the world, by the very low understanding level in the general population about the living world, allowing a large-scale manipulation of people: we now live in a world where gimmicky information has replaced the search for a logical scientific knowledge. Both observations ask almost the same questions: how representations of life are formed in pupils, especially during the first classes at school? And how the life world is represented in teacher’s mind, in other words, what is the teacher’s relationship to knowledge specifically on life science? My proposal is that teaching knowledge about the living world to teachers should start with this second question but, surprisingly, I don’t find relevant works on this topic not only in France but also more largely in Europe or in the US, even if it seems to be clear that each country has developed specific relationships to knowledge on the living, thanks notably to cultural, historical, and educational issues.

Since the founding ideas of S. Freud on the knowledge pulsion in 1905 (Freud, 2013) and of M. Klein on epistemophilic pulsion in 1947 (Klein, 2005) several works have been published on the link that each subject carries on with knowledge and on the individual pathways employed to manage this link. The research group of J. Beillerot at Paris Nanterre University (Beillerot 1989) provided major contributions including the work of C. Blanchard-Laville (2013) using a psychoanalytic-oriented approach. This approach is based on the concepts developed by W.R. Bion (2003) about the role of the K-link (K = Knowledge) in intersubjective relationships beside the classical L (love) and H (hate) links. Briefly, these works pointed to the fact that it is essential to favor the accompaniment of a subject in the elaboration of his relationships to knowledge as well as its possible dysfunctions rather than using more traditional forms of knowledge transmission. J. Lacan (1991) also proposed to consider the speech of Science as an oscillation between the speech of the Hysteric (opening time) and the speech of University (closing time). Psychoanalytic-oriented approaches offer the possibility to access the subjectivity of individual relationships to knowledge, by using clinical interviews (see below) (Yelnik, 2005; Barus-Michel 1986).

The present work allowed to explore the feeling of two primary school teachers regarding their relationships to knowledge on life science thanks to clinical interviews. Interestingly, beside their individual representations, that were as expected very different (see below), a common theme appeared: the absence of doubt and uncertainty in the way they teach life science. This probably refers to the characteristics to their  scientific education and their  subjective representation of the living. Amazingly, a brief survey of French teaching books and official programs indicated that life sciences teaching has been essentially the same since the beginning of the XXe century: it is essentially descriptive with almost no reference to the in-depth mechanisms of life. There is almost no space left for critical thinking and for naming, defining and systematically using elementary biological objects, namely cells and molecules. Thus, I conclude that large avenues exist to start writing a renewed way to teach biology starting from the primary school, provided that will be developed a specific program of scientific education for the trainers of teachers.

2.12.0.0

As an approach to start understanding the teacher’s relationship to knowledge of the living world, I decided in the present preliminary work to explore, by using clinical interviews the feeling and perceptions of two teachers engaged in the French elementary school. Clinical interviews for research purposes are a privileged method to access subconscious representation of subjects. For the present experiment, my initial question was: “What is your feeling and your perception of the feeling of your pupils about living world teaching? “I intentionally selected two highly distinct profiles for these interviews. The first one, Audrey, was a young teacher with almost no experience and who received a literary training followed by historical studies. The second one, Khristine, was an experienced teacher who initially received a scientific training followed by economic studies. As expected, analysis of the manifest and the latent speeches provided clearly distinguishable results for Audrey and Khristine. Audrey started to state that “everything was perfect, life science teaching doesn’t pose any problem, children are happy and have good evaluations”. During this interview, Audrey explained that she stopped life science study in the college and that life and earth sciences were only very rapidly summarized during her teacher’s training. Khristine explained spontaneously and with a lot of details how she was teaching the life world to 6–7-year-old children using observation of plants, snails, butterflies … I will develop during the oral presentation the transfer and counter-transfer processes that were at work during these two interviews but to briefly summarize, I “logically” acted as an inspector/father for Audrey and as a potential sexual prey for Khristine! Finally, this is not so surprising if we consider the perspective that with are dealing with education of singular subjects to life… These interviews were transcribed and analyzed to provide information about the manifest speech as well as the latent speech.

This preliminary work, which is part of an on-going Ph.D. thesis, is based on only two research-oriented clinical interviews, that evidently cannot provide an exhaustive image of the situation of primary school teachers, meaning that it is required to continue teacher’s interviews with other profiles. However, the avenues opened by this first approach seem interesting. On another point of view, it clearly appears that my results are strongly related to the French educational system as well as to French cultural footprints. To expand my conclusions (or not?!) it will be important to compare with the way life science education is made in other countries. As already mentioned, there are only few papers on that topic except from Québec (Pouliot, 2010). A possible route to achieve this comparative study will be to look at the detailed curriculum proposed in each country. For example, it is interesting to observe that in Quebec, mathematics and science and technology are part of the same block, whereas in France mathematics are considered as “fundamental” whereas sciences are classified as “specialties”. Several additional questions should be discussed as to whether, for example, differences in the way life sciences education are constructed in each country may depend on specific cultural and/or historical representations. In this respect, the question of the body and its representation may be critical as the study of schoolbooks on the living world shows a frequent semantic shift from the living to the human body. Whether this may reveal unconscious process at group level has to be explored. Life science education at primary school should be considered as part of a global educative process in which it will play a specific role: to learn how to learn and to be able to accept uncertainties.

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