Educational Studies in the Light of the Feminine E-Book

Christine Bouissou- Bénavail

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 494

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

From the theory-practice couple, there are various ways to approach educational and training issues. Intervention research, reflexive situated action and innovation are some of them. Through the analysis of the author's various experiences - professional and initial training, support for change, organizational assessment, experiential learning, project management - this book explores questions about social or professional contexts and the subjective training of actors. One of the challenges is to understand and challenge phenomena such as the development of autonomy and subsidiarity in changing academic or academic contexts. The book promotes the emergence of an ethical and resilient subjectivity. It will show that storytelling is methodological resources for research-intervention paradigms, support the development of actors and stimulate mobility. The book introduces the hypothesis of an operational principle of the feminine as fluid gender, added value to the collective intelligences of the processes of transformation of education and teaching, in terms of intergenerational transmission and in terms of transferability and Strategic activation of skills between business sectors and intellectual fields. This praxeology reconsiders organizations, temporalities, frames of reference, relaunches a reflection in action at the heart of structuration-transformation projects in governance of public action, as well as in terms of personal and collective encapacitation. The reflection opens to questions of management of conflictualities and management of the subjective, epistemological and professional economies.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction: History of Thought

1 Towards Developmental Psychodynamics

1.1. Spatio-temporal points of reference and development

1.2. Reflective skills and ethical initiation

1.3. A mission to achieve equality

1.4. Professional standards and strategic thinking

2 Governance and Transformation

2.1 Governance at the university

2.2. Supervision and care

2.3. Performativity and autonomy

2.3. Performativity and autonomy

2.4. Practicing and teaching human and social sciences at the university today

3 Women: Lines of Research in Development

3.1. Analyzing the movement

3.2. Conflictualities and femininity

3.3. Modernization and spirituality: reciprocal contributions?

3.4. Feminine scriptures

Conclusion: Potential

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1

. Design of enhancement in the human and social sciences: bridges inst...

Figure 2.2

.

The Humanities and Social Sciences in the National Research Strategy

List of Tables

Chapter 2

Table 2.1

. Teaching and research activities framework detailing elements involvi...

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction: History of Thought

Begin Reading

Conclusion: Potential

References

Index

End User License Agreement

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Education Set

coordinated by

Angela Barthes and Anne-Laure Le Guern

Volume 6

Educational Studies in the Light of the Feminine

Empowerment and Transformation

Christine Bouissou-Bénavail

First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

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© ISTE Ltd 2020

The rights of Christine Bouissou-Bénavail to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939983

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78630-571-8

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Louis-Claude Paquin, Professor at the Ecole des médias de l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), for his attentive proofreading of this book.

IntroductionHistory of Thought

I.1. An introductory framework

Arendt’s text “La brèche entre le passé et le futur” (“Between Past and Future”) (1972) poses questions of knowledge transfer and raises issues about childhood and adulthood: essentially, it is a reflection on the loss of experience leading to a crisis of knowledge transfer, understood as an inability to allow oneself to tell a story that carries meaning for others. These questions are at the heart of the reflections in this book: one’s commitment to others, the common good and the safeguarding of human values are a treasure to behold, in the words of Char (1983a).

What has given impetus to the experience and value of the treasure of those who have lived through the 20th Century, faced with perils, violence and disasters, is the intertwining of life and politics, of the singular and the general, and of the small and the big.

Tragedy, poiesis and creation (including of the self) are therefore some of the reference points from which we will approach questions of development, accompaniment and change in the French higher education working space, which is to be repositioned in a wider world and in specific socio-professional contexts.

It is in this way that we propose a reflection, seeking to shape and share the experience of women working in French higher education at the beginning of the 21st Century. From our vantage point as successors of a certain legacy, the duty that falls to us and the challenge that we take up is thought action: a treasure to be shared through the work of writing, creation and research.

What we are interested in investigating concerns the relationship between learner and educator; however, these actors also directly concern the university, its missions and its place in society. It is a question of inheriting, becoming capable of such, taking up the challenge and, in doing so, learning to hypothesize about the present.

We would like to enlighten learners and educators through the lens of psychodynamics in the light of our research experiences and our practices as trainers and teachers. What vision do we have of ourselves, of others, of our needs? What is our understanding of the institution in which we operate? What relationship with standards, codes and values do we need to build in order to operate in this environment? How does the research activity best enable us to ask these questions and initiate processes to transform structures, tools and actors?

We have thus observed, collected materials and drawn up reports on experiences in order to investigate the meaning of commitment to work and professional life over a period of time. Our resources include:

– psychological work and studies in which the notion of conduct and the relationship between thought and behavior, subjects and institutions were explored;

– an eight-year teacher training exercise in which issues of reflecting and elaborating on experience were central;

– experience of supervising and managing a university which allowed us to widen the frame of reference and to re-question the future of the university with a fresh perspective.

Finally, we compliment these resources by accompanying the evaluation of establishments with pedagogical guidance.

Our orientation, taken on an intellectual, epistemic and even strategic level, was an extension of the analysis of the problems that emerged along the way, which deserved further examination and creative thought.

I.2. Points of reference and structure

In a teacher training institute, we have developed closely linked research and training activities – similar to what is called research and development (R&D) in other sectors. The IUFM1 was an opportunity to develop, within the collectives already formed or through networking, a range of actions combining analysis of practices, theoretical elaboration, confrontation, co-construction, innovation, experimentation and evaluation.

1 L’Institut universitaire de formation des maîtres.

At stake was the need to (re)consider with prudence and design a model to ascertain the theoretical foundations of a sector that was becoming professionalized and “universitarized” and to grasp the scientific and strategic stakes of a certain number of its uses, for example, that of the reflexive practitioner. The fields of knowledge surrounding the psychology of work, sociology of inequalities and organizational analysis have made it possible to make progress in this area, by re-examining types of socio-cognitive skills and mental processes that many authors have shown to be a prerequisite for teachers’ academic success and professional mastery.

This leads to a certain number of questions about the notion of professional action, the relationship between action/reflection/decision proving to be not only infinitely complex but also crucial in a sector where the principle of work/study placements underpins entry into the profession and profoundly structures the formative experience, that of the trainers and of the trainees. Informing and orienting the management of training courses in the best possible way using the results of a research activity and training, the trainers are the axes that have organized our line of study. Questions of knowledge transfer and the knowledge economy arise, aiming to assess what a research activity brings to the overall dynamics of an institution and its structure and to appreciate what it brings to a training program (training through research is considered to be the crème de la crème of training methods, but how can its added value be objectively assessed?).

The lack of popularity of teacher training may partly explain the desire of institutions to establish themselves as places of research and high-level training institutions, capable of networking, importing for study first, and then drawing inspiration from training models from other sectors. This is the case, for example, of the reflexive practitioner model proposed by Schön (1983), based on an observation of the socio-cognitive functioning of architects or engineers who have to deal with complex problems and who respond to them with a capacity for rapid analysis integrating intuitions, hypotheses and reflection during and within the activity (Lemaître 2003).

The problems inherent to the university, in the post-bachelor/master/doctorate period, have marked out the rest of the journey. Support for success, the professionalization of studies and the notion of a training ecosystem have defined the work of designing and supporting an attractive study program adapted to students returning to school, at the interface of the university and the professional world: a DEUST (French scientific and technical university diploma), which has since been transformed into the first and second years of a Bachelor’s degree in educational sciences. At the same time, the case of educational assistants caught our attention: the precarious situation of these young contract workers, which is interesting from a developmental point of view, and the quasi-initiative nature of this experience, led us to reflect on the nature of development in adulthood and work as a place where one is tested and matures, with the role of elders proving fundamental as a support point and mouthpiece, when the young person seeks to access their own normativity. The elder can be found as the boss of the training company who has the right words at the right time to invite the individual to leave school and enter the vita activa.

A gender equality task force at the IUFM, followed by integration into a research team, focused on the study of social inequalities within schools, which led to work on gender differences and gender in education and training. The work was initially aimed at re-examining traditional representations and problems regarding academic success, pedagogical norms or standards, and the socio-cognitive issues of teaching and learning situations. Since sociological research on girls’ educational success too often conveys a narrow conception of educational success and development, it seems judicious and relevant to focus on less visible and less known phenomena, such as the transfer of knowledge between father and daughter, the conditions for speaking out as a civic act of responsibility and recognition, and ways of promoting, through listening and dialogue, the alteration of symbolic systems. Elements previously brought to light by the study of the differentiated skills of fathers and mothers in the family environment led our observations in the school field and made it possible to identify the subconscious way in which gender norms cross and structure spaces (physical and psychic), marking them without the subjects’ knowledge and without the knowledge of even the most enlightened observers.

The questions of women’s inheritance of knowledge produced, conveyed and dominated by men over the past centuries give a particular color to the reflection and the action of transformation that we are pursuing. The feminine constitutes a specific and targeted expertise, a focus to which particular attention will be given in the following pages. It calls, in turn, for us to return to the fundamentals, to revisit common notions – such as the environment, work, collective identity, creativity and combativeness – and to depart from the framework or even overturn it.

The observation that the original intentions of projects, programs and reforms, whether at the state, institutional or even team level, usually dissolve before the beneficiaries perceive the meaning and effects has reinforced our resolve to focus on the conditions of practice of the teaching and research profession and possible investments in collective spheres of work. The three main reasons for this are the duty of self-training, translation and concern for the permanence of the social bond. The analysis of the activity, its failures as well as its successes, coupled with an awareness of management issues, can help to make the process within an establishment and its networks more fluid, to structure and nourish the social fabric by renewing it. The result is a triple deontic aim:

– self-study;

– translation, mediation and sharing of symbolic frameworks and tools;

– concern for continuity and revitalization of social ties and public service.

In this spirit and to guarantee the broadest possible horizon for research and training practices, efforts should be made to decompartmentalize disciplines and training sectors, for example, by piloting a transversal department of human and social sciences for teacher training, or by working in conjunction with the university’s strategic bodies for the recognition of multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral sectors of activity. The ambition for innovation and transdisciplinarity that the human and social sciences claim is an opportunity. Of course, the ability of the players to broaden their field of reflection and scope of action and to make a concrete commitment is the sine qua non condition for the operationalization of this ambition. There is no shortage of tools: project-based approaches, institutional arrangements and structuring programs at the level of emerging institutional configurations, which are conducive to the renewal of training policies. The work of monitoring emerging sectors of activity and skills/trades can be fully integrated into the practices of teacher-researchers and the development of university training offers with a view to facilitating lifelong learning and vocational learning.

The strategic dimension, which can be studied and promoted both in terms of individual and organizational development, brings intentionality to the action of accompanying change. In concrete terms, it is a question of identifying the issues, discerning the importance of the accessory in hypercomplex contexts, inscribing the organization (individual or collective) in a long and tense time towards the desirable horizon, giving a vast and open meaning to the actions carried out and the decisions taken – it is a question of deploying time (déployer le temps), as Ost (1997) invites us to do, and of preserving the breathing time necessary to take a step back, observe, assess and study.

French universities are generally a public space for teaching and research. They are autonomous, in a sense that was recognized long before the 2007 LRU (Liberties and Responsibilities of Universities) Act. Derrida (2001) insists on this unequivocal primary vocation of universities, which should persist even when inevitable social and institutional transformations are taking place. Today, more than ever before, having control of their budget and payroll in a context of limited or even reduced public funding, universities find themselves having to respond both to strong social demands and to take charge even more than in the past by finding new resources and developing new means of action. Their democratic and administrative organization constitutes the framework from which changes, mutations and modernization can take place, but not without the support of actors who must then be accompanied, trained and supervised.

The issues of democratization, mobility, normativity (what is important, definitive, significant and relevant), orientation, criticism and individuation (of the self, collectives, knowledge and tools) are crucial. In what ways are the points of reference provided by the tradition of thought sufficiently usable to address the problems of the present? These are some of the questions that guide the production of this book, in which the question of conflict is recurrent and structures the reflection on human transformations.

There are two opposing forces exerting themselves on the individual. The past pushes them towards the future, the future pushes them towards the past. Caught in this rift, humanity must fight against them and inhabit the conflict. This gap is also, according to Arendt (1972), the place of meaning and problematization, and offers a possible starting point for a diagonal line. Unlike the forces exerted by the past and the future, which are unlimited in origin and are antagonized instead of the subject matter, even at the risk of ossifying it, the diagonal of the action is a saving force, which is anchored in the present in tension, an unlimited force in terms of its future, and which thus proves to be open to the creation of meaning, commitment and freedom.

When the immediate environment and the present close on themselves, shrivelled and cold, this breach can become food for thought, the starting point (from which to depart or to get rid of it). It becomes necessary to rethink the political and the professional in one’s own language and with one’s own voice. It is a task that falls to each new generation. It is a never-ending job, albeit not an impossible one.

We are therefore looking for ways to redefine modes of contentiousness that are more conducive to engagement in the profession and in concrete action, and to the subjectivation of individuals. Simondon’s (1989) concept of individuation is an important resource in this regard. This hybrid reflection aims to bring together various themes: femininity and governance, technicality and transversality, development and pragmatism, distance and commitment of the researcher.

Chapter 1 allows us to retrace previous reflections, to gather basic information aimed at promoting a psychodynamic perspective of development within study and work, supporting a practice and an ethos, and offering the foundation and the distance necessary to address polymorphic socio-professional issues.

Chapter 2 focuses on reflections and achievements in the development of higher education, research and universities, through an analytical and prospective approach.

Chapter 3 is devoted to taking the question of women’s experience further. The study of socio-psychological phenomena, in terms of lifelong development, gives a central place to the question of engagement in action and highlights an axiology of the feminine as an epistemic principle of transformation.

1Towards Developmental Psychodynamics

1.1. Spatio-temporal points of reference and development

The challenge of this first chapter is to rethink the coordinates of time and space in life, work, training and study. To promote individual and collective development, it is sometimes necessary to open the black boxes, to free ourselves from frameworks and house arrests; we are thinking in particular about the sharing of power and knowledge between disciplinary academic fields that hampers inventiveness. Here, philosophical thinking and the analysis of sociotechnical processes become intertwined, and ethical considerations seek to be articulated through the analysis of uses and tools. We wish to encourage a fresh perspective on development, based on collective intelligence.

1.1.1.Sense of normativity

1.1.1.1. Normativity: orientation of behavior

“From his years as a pacifist Canguilhem had thus retained not a love of revolt or opposition, but the very essence of their deep causality: a true spirit of resistance, grounded in the effectiveness of prohibition and authority. Every man ought, in his view, to be a rebel, but every rebellion ought to aim at a creation of an order higher than that of subjective liberty: an order of reason and conceptuality.” (Roudinesco 2010, p. 25)

The notion of normativity is borrowed from the physician and philosopher Georges Canguilhem. First of all, it is a reference in terms of life projects and committed life, human development in its vital and social dimension, and the demand for human dignity: the subject, built up through a journey and trials and tribulations, must be able to answer for their life, choices and determinations.

Through an analysis of the trajectories that we will develop throughout this book, ethical questions arise along with the observation that they constitute the major challenge, the axis around which everything can be organized, the gravitational center where decisions are made, orientations are colored, and health and vitality (of individuals as well as groups) are maintained and updated.

Normativity is the ability to invent responses based on a knowledge pattern, a set of rules; it functions as an organized whole, a proposal and response matrix, geared towards action in an environment with which it is congruent, but which it can also cause to change, or allow it to resist.

Normativity can lead the subject to break off cooperation with its environment, in order to invent elsewhere a continuity made impossible in the present state:

“I am well to the extent that I am able to take responsibility for my actions, to bring things into existence and to create relationships between things that would not come to them without me, but which would not be what they are without them. And so I need to get to know what they are in order to change them.” (Canguilhem 2002, p. 68, author’s translation)

Normativity cannot be studied outside of a living environment, its interactions and values (Le Blanc 1998; Macherey 2009; Jeler 2014). These are trends: they consist less of adapting to externally imposed standards than inventing new standards that are exercised and clarified. In this respect, imagination is at the heart of reason:

“To live, for the animal already, and even more so for the human, is not only to vegetate and conserve, it is to face risks and to triumph over them. Health is precisely, and mainly in humans, a certain latitude, a certain play of norms of life and behavior. What characterizes it is the capacity to tolerate the variation of standards to which only the apparently guaranteed and always necessarily precarious stability of situations and the environment confers a misleading value of definitive normality.” (Macherey 2016, author’s translation)

Orientation and project questions run through this book as they do through the activities of the teacher-researcher (in terms of teaching, research, institutional and socio-professional involvement), in particular:

– in supporting the student’s professional project and by focusing on cases of young people in biographical and professional transition;

– by making research an individuation lever for actors (researchers, stakeholders), by encouraging the reflexive process of anamnesis and elaboration;

– as part of the monitoring and evaluation of a higher education establishment strategy (territorial integration, development issues).

While the focus is primarily on the construction of young adults’ educational pathways and first experiences, as well as on their ability to allow themselves to speak out, take risks and make choices, the reflection can be extended to the development and transitions of collectives and organizations, based on autonomy (vs. heteronomy), normativity (vs. normalization), responsibility (vs. passivity), and the use of oneself or ourselves (vs. withdrawal).

In the field of training or apprenticeships, reference to normativity leads to a further mastery of knowledge, a technique, a tool, a resource, that is, what mastery makes possible in terms of the subject’s activity (psyche and action).

The study of normativity is also interesting from the point of view of girls and women: they grow, learn, inherit, speak out, are in a chain of transmission. They invite us to grasp differently social relations, classes, powers and generations. They invite us to design new forms of work and support, including through research.

It turns out that the introduction of a woman’s perspective in the problematization of human issues (which we articulate without limiting it to gender studies) leads to the identification of stumbling blocks, or deviation points, or convergence lines, which we will soon see how to make productive.

1.1.1.2. Normativity: knowledge and academic ethos

In the field of training in teaching and education, it seems useful to share with the professional community a sensitivity to weak or more obvious signals of passivity, error, misinterpretation or even disorientation in the school space.

This is a work of objectification, cross-observation and problematization; it is also a matter of operationalizing and translating theoretical texts into observable indicators, providing tools, and enriching and deepening practical experience.

The work of co-constructing analytical tools and training is based on the notions of implicitness, cognitive stakes, didactic adjustment and secondarization. It requires an incessant movement back and forth from practice to generality and from general reference points to their operationality. The aim is to build a toolbox for observing practices in different disciplinary fields and to test these tools on a variety of teaching sequences, around various disciplinary knowledge. The approach is intended to be co-constructed between trainers in disciplinary didactics and trainers in psycho-sociology (Couture and Bouissou 2003): it puts to work the normativities specific to the trainers’ disciplines, engaging them to experience for themselves the articulation, convergence and multi-referentiality that are advocated in the training projects.

Work carried out over the last few decades has shown that students with difficulties have a tendency to focus on the ordinary, familiar meaning of tasks, objects or content, and that they do not identify the cognitive issues involved and transfer little of their knowledge from one domain to another:

“They are locked in a perspective of doing, by seeking immediate success, and they handle school tasks without trying to grasp the meaning of them, that is, what they could potentially learn from them.” (Bautier and Goigoux 2004, p. 90, author’s translation)

They are unequally prepared to cope with the requirement of secondarization, and they are all the less helped to do so since this requirement remains very largely implicit and opaque to the teachers for whom these changes in status and register are self-evident.

The less professionals take the measure of the academic characteristics (in other words, its second dimension regarding ordinary practical life, which is less obstinately reflexive), the less they make it an object of study, and the less they help the students to build a secondarized relationship with the world, which is a condition for successful learning at school.

The key concept of “secondarization” refers to a cognitive disposition on which school activities are based. Built by the school, starting in kindergarten, it allows the development of reflexivity, distancing, and the transformation of the lived and familiar, through their decontextualization. This provision is initially rooted in the primary family upbringing. Since it is not present in a stable and equal manner in all children, secondarization becomes a process of differentiation and further inequalities. By engaging more fully in metacognitive analysis of activities, successful students understand the normative nature of school: they grasp the issues, the foundations, the intentions, the methods and the strategies.

Failure or success at school is the result of a confrontation between students’ socio-cognitive dispositions and the impenetrability, or implicitness, of school requirements. What makes the difference between failure and success therefore is ultimately the greater or lesser ability of students to rely on cognitive clarity and knowledge of the school’s issues. The socio-didactic approach that makes it possible to establish this observation carries a plurality of concerns and intentions. It seeks to understand the conditions of access to academic knowledge, in a multidisciplinary framework and throughout schooling. It is mainly based on material collected in situ (sequences filmed in class in different elementary school grades and in different subjects, interviews with professionals, students or families) and evaluates the effects of co-presence or confrontation between various protagonists in school education.

The work formulates and brings into play the hypothesis that academic failure or success results from the confrontation between students’ socio-cognitive dispositions and the impenetrability, or implicitness, of academic requirements. To do this, the complementary nature of the focus on classroom activities is necessary. The didactic viewpoint focuses on the objectives sought, to situate the contents and approaches according to disciplinary traditions and to grasp the nature of the knowledge at stake in the sequence. The psycho-sociological approach aims to grasp the specific nature of school socialization, the relationships between discourse and practices, the processes of differentiation, and the mental operations brought about by tasks. It allows for a shift in questioning between what the teacher does and what the students do. It concerns the inter- and intra-psychic dimension (Vygotsky 2012), which proves crucial when analyzing practices, and presupposes the construction of an adapted methodology, guiding the observation.

The approach is intended to be clinical, normative and comprehensive:

– it is attentive to the way in which the subjects construct the meaning of the situation they are experiencing, and how they ask and answer questions;

– it concerns the relevance of the knowledge transmitted, the teaching and learning processes;

– it seeks to grasp the teacher’s choices by highlighting the tensions that are at the heart of their work and the constraints they are experiencing.

The magnitude of the task to be accomplished in training and support is measured: the challenge of articulation to be strengthened between knowledge and disciplines, and the challenge of successful complementarity between theory and practice. Helping trainee teachers to prepare themselves to face these conditions of practice implies leading them to assimilate frames of reference and to build skills for observing and analyzing practices in situ (Baillat et al. 2003, 2006; Bouissou and Brau-Antony 2005). Reflection on the normative construction of students leads to a mirror-image questioning of the normativity of professionals, including one’s own.

1.1.1.3. Normativity: encadrement and professional reflexivity

The tool-based analysis of training situations and school teaching situations illustrates what the creation of the IUFMs1 was intended to achieve: a contribution to the unification of teacher training, preparation of actors for the drawn-up analysis of practices, access to procedural knowledge and concrete approaches to reciprocal translations between general abstract visions and reflective situated action, knowledge and skills. But what about the trainers?

The dynamics of the IUFM (perceptible in particular through the numerous conferences, workshops, study days and summer universities for trainers, created and run by them) aimed at the co-transformation of the practices of supervisors, trainee teachers and trainers: getting involved in the idea of reflective analysis and in the elucidation of the normativities at work in the practices should lead to a step back, an awareness, a setting in motion.

We participated in this movement by developing a research activity focused on issues relating to the trainee teachers‘ knowledge and reflexivity, and also on the explicit or underlying conceptions of training plans, in order to explain or shed light on certain recurrent difficulties encountered in monitoring teachers and to seek ways of acting differently.

This involves, for example, identifying criteria and indicators (reflexivity, relationship to knowledge) that can be found, for example, in the final dissertations of teachers in initial training (professional dissertation) and seeking to demonstrate their heuristic and selective quality. The challenge is to make training evolve (better focus on the analysis of practice, adequacy of conceptual tools and translation into action and vice versa).

Being concerned about normativity means being able to redefine, redirect and reclarify objectives and goals during the course of an activity, particularly in long-term project approaches. The notion of normativity is a relevant and original tool for thinking and helping the collective, leadership, training, adhesion and deontic activity. Rather than falling into a specular relationship with the learner, by objectivizing gaps, limits and shortcomings on their own side, it is rather a question of looking for what and how, as a professional, one can act.

Encouraging the empowerment (enabling) of actors and collectives at work is a strategic issue in terms of supervision, management and personal and institutional health. How does the organization (IUFM, university) deal with empowerment? What use does it make of its resources, tools and potential?

In terms of supervision, we will therefore take an analytical view of the conditions of collective work, management and project management. One can even question training policies, as the ultimate place where practices are recorded, or which naturalizes, rationalizes, even questions and transforms them. It is indeed a question of being more vigilant with regard to the work activity, the relationship between means and ends, and of trying to assess the relevance of the means, their adequacy and their cost with regard to their stakes (see sections 1.4.3 and 2.2.4).

What is proving to be relevant and increasingly recognized is the development of research programs and management for professionals to help actors to equip themselves, to co-construct criteria and indicators, in the field of educational transformation and teaching – and more generally in social innovation (ANSA 2014; France Stratégie 2016; Bouissou 2017a). The evidence-based approach, as practiced in the implementation of the quality policy defined at the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) scale, leads to the identification of shared frameworks, principles and methodologies and allows for adjustments according to specific contexts and situations (Biémar 2015). As a result of the extension of evaluation and quality issues in all sectors of public action, new jobs, activities or career opportunities are emerging and raise questions about the conditions for the transfer and translation of skills and support.

1.1.1.4. Normativity: a caring place?

Our reflection leads us to focus on the issue of professional responsibility. Maintenance, concern for oneself (for what founds, animates and inhabits us) and the Socratic maxim “know thyself ” are some of the central points of intellection and personal ethics for the support of adults. The activity of symbolization and reflexivity (in training, then autonomously) can act to mitigate the risk of burnout, by regaining one’s self, one’s way of thinking, feeling and acting.

Concern for the “subject” is as much a concern for the institution: dignity, discernment, clear-sightedness, an effort to formalize work; it is a question of going beyond schematic and disqualifying visions, of recovering dignity with regard to neglected tasks and real work. It is a question of going against the division of labor in order to recover the meaning of the acts (stakes, objectives, initial missions). We will see, thanks to our observations on the university framework and based on Simondon‘s ideas, that there is indeed an opportunity to convene a philosophical reflection on technology and the non-separation between living entities, be they subjective, collective or technical (see Chapter 2). By being aware of the traditional division between technology and thought, we can try to reverse the movement and promote their dialogue and interplay, for a thought that is inscribed, situated and equipped gives collective action back its intelligence. Normativity raises awareness of a vision of the human being as having to find a verticality and a balance between free will and confrontation with reality, between vitality and constraints, between internal and external environment: between inter- and intra-.

The notion of care, which has now become established in the human and social sciences, keeps the concern for vulnerability alive and (paradoxically perhaps) takes on its full power when it leads to questioning the very idea of normativity and therefore of structure, discernment, inner confidence and capability. At a personal level, ethical questioning gives relief to real-life situations and brings vitality and richness. It is not an extra job, but an energy resource, which can translate into support, endurance, resilience and freedom. Training and coaching become involved research. It is not a panacea, but it does give impetus, horizon, ethos and propensity to questioning one’s profession in order to find another use of oneself (see section 1.2.1).

At the same time, the notion of normativity draws attention to the subject’s internal activity (child and adult). The concentrated relationship, vigilant in itself, is built both in the relationship and in the inner solitude in which a work of discernment and sufficient separation between the self and others takes place, conducive to the establishment of an “I–thou” relationship (Buber 1959; Winnicott 2008). It is on this condition that the actor regains his energy and potential for encounter and exchange – unlike a position of indistinction that degenerates into identity or status claims and censors initiatives and alternatives.

The question of normativity also leads us to consider the symbolic dimension in its cultural, social and civilizing dimension and in its subjectivating, structuring, instituting and inspiring dimension for the individual psyche. Frames of references, texts and representations reveal themselves in their dual dimension (passive and active) if we put them to work, if we study them a minima, trying to make them speak; it is a question of identifying what they allow, oblige and leave to the margins2. Under this condition, the reader regains a form of freedom (see section 3.3.2). This is an interdisciplinary issue in the support of adults: how does one become the author of one’s training, action, choices and trajectory? Writing, reading and studying are ways in which autonomy, responsibility and the author’s position can be built (Baillat et al. 2001): for oneself, as well as for others, who can be taught to recognize as the author of a choice, a work, a behavior or a thought.

1.1.2.The psychodynamic approach to work studies

Between internal and external processes, the study of a work (as a human configuration and as a total social fact)3 is an entry point for understanding the human being and what they create, invent, produce and express. In terms of the work’s genetics, it makes the materiality of interiority palpable (that of the work, the author and the receiver), provides tools to design it and study its internal movements, vitality and translation potential.

The notion of the work crosses the activities of the researcher and the trainer in various ways: making a work of one’s profession (to take a reflexive look at it), writing about one’s practice (to guarantee its coherence and to study it in its psychodynamic dimension), making a work collective (to evaluate it, interpret it): the opportunities for a work and deeper study are numerous. In any case, one can consider as a work what structures, what institutes a living entity in its normativity – individual subject as social organization – therefore as a whole, an ecosystem in which one can be a stakeholder:

“For the historian, the psychologist or the sociologist, there is no graspable spirit outside of humans’ behavior among humans. What translates into the notions of work, experience, study, is therefore the participation of humans in the physical and social environment – with all that this participation involves by way of reciprocal actions – and the construction by them of a world, of human worlds, mediated worlds: their creation.” (Meyerson 1987, p. 70, author’s translation)

Taking a historical–cultural approach, the psychologist Ignace Meyerson offers support and an original vision, where culture, meaning, thought, technology and study form a whole, a reality and a corpus of analysis. It is a question of grasping the human from work (as can also and jointly be done from institutions and behaviors), to return to the psychological functions that have been provoked or are being provoked in the author or in the spectator; the positions, in this case, are moving: I observe what I create at another time.

The approach to the institutional environment as a work is useful both to the practitioner, who acts consciously in an environment which they feel part of, and to the researcher who studies that environment systemically. The result is a demanding relationship, for oneself and for others, to what one chooses to observe, study and understand. From a certain point of view, nothing is anecdotal, all human production is part of a larger whole, takes its place there, deserves to be considered and requires a disciplined effort, first of all by giving credit to the authenticity of the work. Authentically, the work speaks to us; what does it say?

This is a good starting point for research. What a future teacher achieves in their professional thesis concerns, in the full sense of the term, a piece of writing, a passage, a human activity both exterior and interior: exteriorization of interiority, interiorization of exteriority; it is a unique movement of self-fabrication and world-making (Bouissou and Aroq 2005).

Institutional realities are therefore also potentially works of art, which we can learn to see as such, as soon as a certain relationship is built up with them in terms of depth and scale. A reform text, a self-evaluation report, a five-year contract and a ministerial convention are affordable, frequent objects, as testimonies, human productions in a time and space, entities that can be seen, read and confirmed, and that perform themselves through their very implementation. Critical thinking can play a profound role if it is able to identify the intentio operis, the intentio lectoris, and the intentio auctoris (Eco 1999).

The work is therefore both the final object and the process that leads to it: both aspects are to be conceived and contained in the same gesture. This therefore simultaneously comprises:

– the singular being who puts himself/herself on stage, in words or images;

– the collective that manifests intent or motive;

– the organization that seeks to transmit, organize and establish itself as a manufacturing process.

The Meyersonian cultural–historical perspective proposes a specific intellectual and subjective attitude, a propensity to problematize in an open and broad manner, as the notion of modernity, as we will see (see section 1.2.2.3), invites to do, and will lead to an openness to hermeneutic work (see section 3.3.2):

“[…] if operation and product are closely interrelated, we always find ourselves before the same set of operans and operatum, where only the perspective of the analyst varies, who sometimes looks at the person operating, sometimes at the person operating with other people, sometimes at the person modifying their operations and being modified by them, sometimes, and who looks at the various products of the various operations.” (Meyerson 1987, p. 70, author’s translation)

1.1.2.1. Evaluation: the institution as a work

In order to evaluate an institution, it is necessary to situate its time(s) and space(s), to understand them in terms of their perspectives and tensions, to map them, to try to make them converge in a unified vision.

The evaluation by the Hcéres4 is part of the overall process of contractualization with the State. It is intended to give the institution a thoughtful view of its situation after a five-year contractual period. The evaluation methodology5 designed by the Hcéres “institutions” department consists of setting aside time for the institution’s self-evaluation before organizing the external evaluation by selected and trained independent experts. The work of self-evaluation is the result of an internal process within the institution. It is the result of a series of choices and reports on the trajectory and strategy, within a network of constraints where creativity has its place and allows management teams and communities to find spaces for freedom and arbitration. Chosen and constrained at the same time, generally under control and set over a long period of time, the situation of an institution can be interpreted as a set of decisions, implementations, diagnoses and adjustments. Organizations, universities and schools are considered, in their general configuration and territorial situation, stakeholders in an ecosystem that should be analyzed.

Box 1.1.Assessment framework: a tool

The same reference system designed by the Hcéres serves as a reference point for self-evaluation and as a guide for the committee of experts to which the external evaluation is entrusted. It is structured into six areas comprising two, three or four fields, for which more precise references are proposed.

Finally, about 30 references (themselves broken down into items) help to define the institution’s strategy in terms of institutional positioning, governance and management, training and research policy, student success and life, promotion of scientific culture and research results, and international relations.

These references are not intended to be systematically filled in, nor are they intended to be exhaustive; they are reference points for experts who collectively develop a vision of the situation and the trajectory of the establishment by studying the documents comprising the file, then by a visit and interviews in situ, and finally by writing a report that is subject to a contradictory procedure with the establishment, which concludes the process.

The benefits of evaluation can be seen when it leads to considering the object to be studied in its own normativity. When the evaluative gesture is based on a self-evaluation and a clear contract concerning each person’s position, it helps to get rid of disqualifying presuppositions, biases that constitute so many filters and parasites, blocking access to the object to be studied in its authenticity and allowing the object being evaluated to be revealed in its operativity. It aims to provide the evaluated entity with a decentralized, exotopic vision and levers for action.

Evaluation is not so much about the appropriateness of strategic choices as it is about the balance between 1) the strategic objectives, 2) the means actually implemented, and 3) the concrete achievements and results. The institution conducting its self-evaluation is committed to supporting project groups for several months, to drawing up assessments which are, if not exhaustive, then at least balanced and significant: it is a question of taking stock in terms of progress and difficulties, issues and challenges that prove to be crucial in the overall dynamic, and in a legislative, political and institutional framework that it is up to the institution to appraise, understand and interpret.

The experience of evaluation is fruitful and beneficial when it is constructive, well equipped and balanced in terms of the commitment of the various stakeholders:

“The human is an animal that experiments, and probably the only animal that experiments, i.e. an animal that observes the effects of its behavior, constantly asks questions of its physical and social environment, and takes into account the answers from these physical and social environments. It is not enough to say: humans transform their physical and social environment and are transformed by both. There is a constant interplay between environment and agent, technology and mind, experience and spirit. One can even say that the terms of these dualities are never but theoretical extremes: there is no technology that is not penetrated by the mind, no experience that is not shaped by reason, and vice versa.” (Meyerson 1987, p. 68, author’s translation)

Prudence, neutrality, impartiality, integrity and curiosity are some of the qualities and values that are expressed in the approach of those who perceive, welcome, seek to understand and objectify the institution and the service they are evaluating, without projection or complacency. They can transform themselves there, if they make themselves curious about a new reality and make it work with their own culture and experience6.

Those who inherit and evaluate participate in the succession, in the sense of Aufhebung (Derrida 2005): a movement that suppresses and preserves. This process supposes observing and understanding the intrinsic normativity of the objects studied (technical, human, individual, collective), grasping their movement, understanding their positivity and failures, and standing, as Canguilhem suggests, in a position of “over-surveillance”:

“Self-evaluation. Learning that it is important and learning to practice it is one of the key points of your career as a leader or future leader. You need feedback, your teams need self-assessment. You must regularly put into discussion: ‘What do we want to accomplish? What’s my point? What are the criteria for success or for knowing that one is achieving one’s goal? What are the best measures of these criteria to which I have access?’. If you don’t, you or the team will end up conducting activities that have nothing to do with the organization’s goals and missions. The organization itself can lose sight of its objectives. It is not only a self-evaluation but also an organizational evaluation. Asking the question ‘how do I know if it works’ is important.” (Wiseman 2014, author’s translation)7

This is the approach of an actor who takes an active part in the world (an environment, whatever that may be) of which they feel they are the author, for which they must be accountable, in their own name, notably because they are responsible for preserving, raising and transmitting it. We therefore need tools to represent this world, in its dynamics, forms, rhythms and endogenous and exogenous causalities.

1.1.2.2. Moving and developing

Beyond approaches that are too sector-based and favor a single type of causality (and which are closed to many possibilities), we are looking for methods of intellectual work and action that allow movement, that create an ethos, a mètis that help us to construct a certain mobile relationship with symbolic, social, representational and national spaces, spaces of praxis or poetic spaces, while also being attentive to the idea of kairos.

Kairos (god of the opportune moment) is the propitious, determining moment, proper to action, sensitive intelligence and decision (Ost 1997); to seize it, it is necessary to be on the lookout, to know how to wait, not to rush, not to force things. Kairos is an intrinsic motif in the idea of mètis, a particular form of intelligence and thought, based on cunning action, trickery, ploys and also dissimulation, deception, even lies (Détienne and Vernant 1974).

Thus, time and space are inseparable and closely linked to the question of action. This closeness nurtures an understanding of the psychology of adult transformation. These reflections on spaces for exchange, psychic work and supervision can be reinvested in training, in the support of students with heterogeneous profiles and personal and professional situations.

Within the framework of a psycho-sociological training in education, it is a question, for example, of helping to build the best tools to function with flexibility, discernment and awareness, with regard to complex and changing educational, social and intellectual problems.

The human psyche takes shape, unfolds and sets us apart from others in social and psychic spaces. In the family space, at school and at university, people act, learn, transform themselves and work. The inter- and intra-psychic levels are solicited. Arrangements are created, happen, are shared and transferred, often silently (Lahire 2001). They may or may not be activated, depending on the subject’s internal motivations and circumstances, external triggers, and the structuring of the surrounding space (Bernstein 1975; Lautrey 1980; Corcuff 2003). How a skill comes into being and takes shape is a fascinating question for anyone interested in development: looking for the origin of one skill or another, finding the circumstances in which it was forged, recognizing it in another form, in another space and time, helping to transfer it, etc.

With a view to the sustainable development of students, that is, their ability to bounce back, transfer and continue their training beyond the years of study, it is necessary to build a lively relationship with reality, educated and problematized, offering a horizon of possibilities in terms of choice and guidance in terms of conduct (see section 2.4.3).

Is space a light, fluid atmosphere in which we move, a thicker, structuring substance, a void offering neither support nor benchmarks? Who speaks of it, names it, represents it and helps to create it? What place do we hold for ourselves in this space – in this work – when we grasp it as a human totality that is visible? The way in which we, as teachers or researchers, communicate, address each other and take our place in the transmission chain is a topological question: the interlocutor we create, the interlocutor we design. And who will meet and associate, perhaps, with the other’s space and willingness to appropriate the legacy. The representation of space is a fundamentally political question because it induces a vision of human life and its management in the space of the city – or cities:

“The primary metaphor of the psyche is spatial.” (Dufourmantelle 2009, p. 174, author’s translation).

Box 1.2.Navigating space and time

One example is the initiative S’orienter auXXIesiècle (Navigating the 21st Century), supported by the French newspaper Le Monde. If this event (visible on the Web thanks to texts and videos) differs from the usual academic forms of support and guidance, it is because of the way it represents the space of possibilities: the many participants (quidam, project managers, business leaders and the self-employed) share the story of their career path and wonder about the junctions; the initiative has involved junior professionals from the outset to design the project, innovate on ways to attract the public and disseminate the initiative on the net, beyond the four French cities that have hosted it for the first time in 2016–2017. It is a form of social innovation, interesting to analyze in terms of the changes in relationships with time and space that it creates for stakeholders, including the average observer.

Space is therefore also to be understood as a gap, a distance between one thing and another, between oneself and the other in communication. These considerations may form the backbone of a teacher-researcher’s ethos: in vocational training or initial training, the aim is to promote a multifaceted approach to development (child, adult, professional, young person in transition) throughout life, in changing circumstances.

These are also avenues for reflection and observation that we have approached in the light of the feminine hypothesis, with regard to the use of female students in an elementary school classroom, and with regard to the involvement, empowerment and speaking out of women in the public space (see sections 1.3.4 and 1.4.2).

Moreover, the interest in human work, collective intelligence and the cohesion of energies leads to the multiplication of ways of living and of representing space, of spaces so numerous and polyphonic, now flourishing by their multiplication on the Web. The exercise of supervision and management in a complex institution confirms the richness and necessity of taking an interest in workspaces. The management, understanding, safeguarding and transformation of professional situations understood as complex and approached as such – particularly in project-based approaches – are not easily accommodated by cutting, simplifying or imposing a single plane of thought. On the contrary, they come from the diversity of points of view and voices, and the ability to feel and handle the whole, representing a multiplicity of spaces and scales, each with its own voice.

Collective work leads to a confrontation of the contradictions between space and time. Sometimes, common provisions are altered, lose their original meaning, their normative requirement, change and become fixed in normalizing or even moralizing postures and drift towards violence or dereliction. The question of the structuring of normative spaces and their potential for dissemination and co-construction beyond the geopolitical and representational space, immense and ultra-complex (who can see clearly?), and through the ultra-reduced distances on the Web (everyone can quickly get an idea), is of course a key question. We will approach this question through the question of the feminine and what it can lead us to revisit in terms of normativity, deliberation, problematization and the inner self (see section 3.2). The clash of contrasts (distance/proximity, strangeness/familiarity, complexity/simplicity) proves to be stimulating when dealing with continuous movement.

“There is no milieu, as there is no subject, only virtual worlds. What characterizes the human being in relation to other living beings is that this plasticity is carried by them to its maximum power: natural evolution and their own history, which, it should not be forgotten, is the result of this evolution and is ultimately only a derived production, a branch, have given them the capability both to change their environment through technology and, if necessary, to change their environment by exterritorialization, a capability which other species do not have, at least to this degree and at this rate.” (Macherey 2016, author’s translation)

1.2. Reflective skills and ethical initiation

We often meet professionals who are looking for new points of reference, or even a new culture, to practice their profession differently – sometimes to overcome a crisis in purpose and commitment to the profession. We also meet students who are looking for training, without really knowing what to do or how to do it. We would like to encourage reflection on the training and support of students in connection with their professional or pre-professional experience and their career path (given that the university experience is an element that makes sense in the context of an overall dynamic).

These reflections are intended to be useful for work of oneself, or on oneself, as an ethical subject of professional practice, which prefigures the model of the reflective practitioner, an important reference in professional training (see section 1.4.1.1).

However, it should be pointed out that the reflexive exercise that we observed and practiced in the vocational training sector (IUFM), which correlates with a fairly clear and unified institutional project, is not part of the professional culture of university teachers as we have personally known and experienced it, neither in the organization and pedagogical leadership nor in the supervision of research (what is sometimes called intermediate leadership in the organization chart of an institution). The involvement of the teacher and the teacher-researcher in an analysis of practices is only occasional. The relationship with professionalization is therefore poorly constructed, both on the student and teacher sides. It is therefore difficult to envisage the development of students’ reflexivity (if we think of Schön’s work on the reflexive functioning of professionals, we understand that this exercise is based on a defined professional context – normative, axiological – which the university does not have, except for some very targeted and professionally oriented training).

The fact remains (and perhaps all the more so) that the questions of empowerment, of leaving the state of minority, essentially structure a training project, provide a framework to an intellectual path and nourish a professional project. It is a question of knowledge to be transmitted, of a critical posture to be constructed, in other words, of an adult normative construction to be engaged or re-engaged.