Session Information
23 SES 02 C, Inspecting Schools: Policy and Practice
Paper Session
Contribution
In the French Education system, relationships between administrators and field actors are very ambiguous. They vacillate between partnership, mutual ignorance tinged with critical discourses or even a real mistrust. Studies about teacher’s evaluation in Europe (Paquay, 2004) but also researchs on the teaching profession in Europe (Osborn, 2002, Esteves, 2002) lead to the same outcome. This research aims at understand the reasons of this ambiguousness. To overcome the dichotomy between administrators and field actors, set in the common sense, this work analyses the professionnal activity, by the meaning of Y. Clot (1995, 2007).
The data corpus is constituted by interviews carry out with French first degree teachers and schools inspectors and by writings on activity realised at distance by five schools inspectors.
First, we highlight logics which direct actors in their work. We focus on four different working spaces : individual inspection, relationships with the pupil’s parents, use of projets, use of national évaluations of pupils). Thus, data analysis expose that teachers’s and shools inspectors’s professional activities are lived and organised either as a situation or as a file (Starck, 2009). Situation is involved in the « ordinary fabric of live », which leads to a logic of complexity (Durrive, Schwartz, 2009). File make happen series of « administrative events » which bring about a logic of rationalization.
Analysis coming next point that this two logical ways are in a dialectical connection. Thus, the spreeding of professionnal activity allows the passage between situation and file or, in the contrary, separate them. The ambiguousness which exists between administrators and field actors is, in fact, presents in the activity of each professionnal : teachers and shools inspectors have daily to arbitrate in their own work between two logical ways. Finally, this ambivalant relationship shows a difficulty to work following both rationality and complexity.
Leaning on B. Latour’s studies (2001), more particulary on the concepts of reductions and amplifications, but also on propositions of H. Arendt (1972) and O. Reboul (1989), it appears that this dialectical relationship is based on the fact that teach and administer are not scientific activities but, as we propose to call them : « integrative activities ». At last, we discuss this new terminology.
To conclude, we discuss the opportunity of « hybrid forum » (Derouet, 2002) to manage efficiently administer activities and field activities.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Clot, Y. (2007), De l’analyse des pratiques au développement des métiers, Education & Didactique, vol, n°1, 83-94. Clot, Y. (1995), Le travail sans l’homme ? Pour une psychologie des milieux de travail et de vie, Paris : La Découverte. Derouet, J.-L. (2002), Du transfert à la circulation des savoirs et à la reproblématisation de la circulation des savoirs à la constitution d’un forum hybride et de pôles de compétences, Recherches et formations, n°40, 13-25. Latour, B. (2001), L’espoir de Pandore. Pour une version réaliste de l’activité scientifique. Paris : La Découverte. Paquay, L. (dir.) (2004), L’évaluation des enseignants. Tensions et enjeux. Paris : L’Harmattan. Reboul, O. (2006, 1ère éd.1989), La philosophie de l’éducation, 9e éd. Paris : P.U.F., 127p. (Que sais-je, n. 2441) Schwartz, Y., Durrive, L. (2009), L’activité en dialogues. Entretiens sur l’activité humaine (II), Toulouse : Octarès éd.
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