This paper aims to examine the anthropological presuppositions underlying Philippe Foray’s critical argument concerning the role of schools in shaping citizens. While we share his concerns regarding the school’s claim to promote citizenship, we disagree with certain aspects of his argument. More specifically, we challenge the notion that an individual’s engagement in political life is a matter of personal choice. Rather, we contend that human beings are intrinsically political and that their very humanity is inseparable from active participation in social and civic affairs. In response to the liberal anthropological framework, we plea for a reconsideration of citizenship within a virtue-ethical framework —one that offers a more meaningful account of both education and everyday life. On this view, citizenship is not simply a legal status or a set of social practices but a virtue in itself. This shift in perspective necessitates a fundamental reconsideration of civic education: rather than approaching it as the mere transmission of knowledge, habits, or rules, we must confront a more fundamental issue—whether, and under what conditions, citizenship can truly be taught.
The introduction of socially acute questions into the school curriculum requires political education aimed at understanding the problems of the Anthropocene. From this perspective I favor the study of controversies and social conflicts. This strategy is caught in a tension between the aim of the common good and the pluralism of conceptions of the good which is expressed, in a conflicting manner, in a democratic society. How, in education, can we take charge of both this ideal aim of the good and the reality of social conflicts? And how can we avoid reproducing the controversy with students instead of clarifying it? Such tensions are central to Dewey's political philosophy. This article strives to show that the explanation of these tensions between common and conflict proves extremely instructive for political education based on the elucidation of controversies concerning socially acute questions and makes it possible to define a critical perspective in a problematizing community.
The paradigm of inclusivity (Dugas, 2022), through the ethical foundations implied in its rhetoric, such as the ideas of living together or a school for all, seems to resonate with the notion of the common good, which has quietly reemerged on the political scene in recent years. In France as in Brazil, implementing the inclusive paradigm comes with a tension between two contrasting notions: that of the common, underlying the ethics of the project, and its opposite, that of the particular, present in the expression ’special educational needs,’ which is central to school inclusion. Since these epistemological issues are key to the ethical and praxeological construction of the inclusive paradigm, a deeper reflection is needed. Therefore, this article offers an analysis both on the convergence between the notions of inclusion and the common good, and on their connection to educational policies in France and Brazil. This analysis allows us to observe that the rhetoric in favor of inclusion can be constructed within logics perceived or interpreted as contradictory, even paradoxical, like the common/particular conceptual couple. These contradictions, if transmuted into a divide, can weaken the anchoring of the inclusive paradigm in school reality through a climate of instability and uncertainty within the project itself.
Under what conditions can spiritual experience have a place in schools, and at the same time be an asset to a democratic society? John Dewey’s philosophy neither defends religious institutions nor promotes anti-religious atheism. On the narrow path between the critique of religions and that of their gradual disappearance, this author focuses our attention on a precise type of experience : secularized spiritual experiences, i.e. those freed from their religious anchorage. He defends the thesis that these experiences, instead of dividing people or isolating them, could be shared and weave a common thread, if certain conditions are met. It is the study of these conditions that we present here in this rereading of Dewey’s writings on the subject. The aim here is to place the reflections of A Common Faith within Dewey’s theory of democracy and education, and to draw from this work avenues of reflection for a democratic education in spiritual experience.
In order to rethink the relationship between democracy, the commons and education, our work sets out, drawing on a critical epistemological approach, to re-examine the way in which the school system is embedded within modern capitalist social formation and contributes to the construction of a world as ‘one’ that effectively contributes to a break with the development of ‘commons’. Through its central categories – the creation of an ‘autonomous’ sphere detached from the rest of society, an educational activity taking place within delimited and rationalised spaces under the ‘domination of time’ dedicated to the implementation of ‘educational programmes’, the pitting of children against one another in competition designed to produce academic performance, a political education reduced to procedural democracy and a state-controlled political community – we aim to demonstrate how the modern educational project, spearheaded by the school, has historically and radically taken shape outside the commons and through a process of supplanting ‘popular’ educational practices.
Because of their explicitly normative ambition, “educations for” revive one of the thorniest questions in education, which properly belongs to moral and political philosophy: the justification of education. From this perspective, therapeutic patient education (TPE) serves as a paradigmatic case study. TPE aims to bring about a positive change in the patient—but how can we define this “better” that it seeks to achieve? Should it be identified by the extent to which the educational action aligns the patient with the objective neutrality of therapeutic logic? Or, conversely, by the extent to which the patient shapes the educational action according to the norms of their lived experience? The challenge of defining the “better” that TPE seeks to achieve is all the more pressing in the context of “health democracy,” which is meant to uphold each patient’s conception of the “good life.” Situated at the intersection of philosophy and didactics, this article aims to explore the conditions necessary for creating a shared space in which caregiver-educators and patients can democratically define what constitutes the meliorative change targeted by TPE.
The commons are resources managed collectively according to rules established by the actors themselves. Ostrom’s work marks a turning point: based on the analysis of cases of sustainable success of the commons, she shows, against Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, the rationality and effectiveness of the self-government of the commons. Drawing on this work and on Castoriadis’ philosophy of “instituting praxis”, Dardot and Laval, in Commun, make the commons the political principle of the institution of the commons and of a global transformation of society. Only common action can democratically decide what is common. By referring to Dardot and Laval and analysing the Italian experience of the commons (the ‘Rodotà Commission’, the remunicipalisation of water in Naples), which contrasts the legalisation and constitutionalisation of the commons with the discretionary power of the state, we will show that the common and the commons produce a broadening and radicalisation of democracy, and that they are probably the best way of dealing with the Anthropocene.
This article deals with the political philosophy of education and the history and current state of political and educational ideas. We explore the body of thought of contemporary American neoconservatism and try to see what it can teach us about political education in 21st-century Western democracies. We begin by showing that these neoconservatives are united by the idea that democracy as a way of life is in itself a common, involving a community of morals (moral, behavioral and cultural), in which intellectuals would take on the role of public teachers and educators. We then focus on the ideas of moral clarity and cultural cohesion in domestic policy, and then on the idea of democratic peace, positing the need for a democratic citizenry that is as quick to peaceful internal coexistence as it is to vigorous defense against external threats. Finally, we propose a synthetic view of a political philosophy of neoconservative education, and outline a continuation of the reflection on neoconservatism in France.
A discursive community of professional practice (DCPP) brought together a collective of stakeholders from French-speaking Switzerland to design teaching and learning activities, as well as a continuing professional development programme centred on the sustainable neighbourhood, conceived as a complex educational problem in the era of the Anthropocene. This article examines the potential of this participatory research framework, mediated and supported by a system of cultural and semiotic tools, to facilitate knowledge circulation among participants and the co-construction of professional knowledge for teaching this issue. Analysis of discursive interactions across fifteen sessions, combined with classroom implementation data, highlights the community’s potential for co-constructing professional knowledge related to the management of prospective, interdisciplinary problem-solving approaches that integrate problematisation and modelling while incorporating technical design processes. However, the project’s STEM-oriented focus led to prioritising ecological and technical dimensions at the expense of the social dimension in the problematisation of the sustainable neighbourhood. This orientation proved restrictive in mobilising the political perspective that underpins education in the Anthropocene.
This article is part of the development of the collaborative research (CR) approach in education. More specifically, we examine the co-production (analysis and dissemination of results) and its contribution to the professional development of the participating practitioners. In previous work on this collaborative model, we had not extensively explored this aspect, which is central to understanding the contributions of this type of research and the conditions for its dissemination. We draw on a four-year CR project conducted with pedagogical advisors in mathematics, whose goal was to understand their profession in relation to teachers’ support. Our analysis elucidates the form that professional development takes : the development of a professionality, closely intertwined here with the development of a profession whose contours are being clarified, specified, and refined. We examine in parallel how our epistemological perspective of this CR approach is coherent with the way co-production and development are conceived and lived.
This article explores a support approach. Grounded in exchanges between researchers and teachers, this participatory research combines scientific validity (tested didactic foundations) and social validity (appropriation by actors). Through the study of two teachers’ trajectories, this article provides an exploratory analysis of the levers that foster professional development in the context of implementing evidence-based educational tools. The findings show that structured didactic tools, gradual integration, hands-on training, and supportive guidance contribute to transforming teaching practices and conceptions. The interplay between effective practices and professional reflexivity appears essential for establishing sustainable changes and paves the way for transferability to other contexts.
The study focuses on the entry of 6th graders into middle school and the accompaniment by a principal educational counselor (CPE) of an educational ritual around living well together. This “Big Brother - Big Sister” ritual is based on mentoring of 6th graders by some of their peers from 3rd grade classes. Based on theoretical postulates derived from the didactics of educational action, our results document the professional gestures of the accompanying CPE CPEand his didactic transposition of the knowledge of how to live together, enabling the construction of pupils’ relationship to the school norm. In addition, we show the psychosocial pressures that exist between parents and pupils during this period, as well as the challenges involved in acquiring the psychosocial and emotional skills needed for peaceful social relations.
Our contribution questions the epistemological positioning at the foundation of a research intervention (Amigues et al., 2004) which aims to support the transformative agency (Engeström and Sannino, 2013) of the actors engaged in the co-evaluation of an citizenship education system in a vocational high school. Conducted over two years, the research explores the French system Ateliers Démocratiques pour une Expression Réflexive (ADER) (Müllner, 2021), centered on ethical and citizenship issues. The theoretical-methodological foundations are based on the theorizations of activity with the work of Clot (1999, 2008a) in the clinic of activity and those of Engeström (2007) considering the historical-cultural approach. In such a dynamic of co-evaluation of the ADER program within a vocational high school, how does the research program reveal professional controversies that are conducive to teacher professional development ? In order to study the implementation of the Ader program based on the use of teaching tools and research methods, the discussion focuses on understanding how the collaborative and reflective impetus contributed to a transformative approach to teaching practices.
Our contribution focuses on the implementation of constellations in France at an academic level. Constellations is an in-service training scheme for schoolteachers inspired by participatory research and based on reflective and collaborative analysis of teachers’ actual practices. In this scheme, trainers accompany the practitioners (not researchers). We then question the respective roles of trainer and teachers in joint action during a constellation in mathematics regarding the professional knowledge mobilized, the modalities of co-conception of classroom situations. Our research pursues a dual epistemic and transformative objective, and combines different corpuses (questionnaires, films, semi-directed and self-confrontation interviews) and scales of analysis (mesoscopic, mesodidactic, microdidactic), at the crossroads of scientific orientations from didactics and work psychology. Our analyses are based on the descriptors of joint action transposed to the training context. Highlighting the processes of negotiating and co-elaborating professional knowledge raises questions about the conditions, modalities and obstacles to the professional development of primary school teachers.
This paper is a methodological reflection on the production of knowledge in collaborative research. We draw on the approach of Desgagné and Bednarz, which considers knowledge as co-constructed through the complementarity of research and practice. However, we question what this complementarity implies when knowledge is “co-produced”—that is, during data analysis and results dissemination. We choose to view research and practice as equal rather than complementary. We therefore rethink co-production through philosopher Rancière’s method of equality and introduce an analytical perspective focusing on common objects of thought, constituted by research and practice. This approach is illustrated using secondary data from collaborative research on school transitions in mathematics. This leads, on the one hand, to the conclusion that analysis can already exist during collaboration, through the interweaving or appropriation of discourse. On the other hand, that dissemination can exist as a sharing, also taken up by practice. Finally, we suggest that written analysis in research and its dissemination can be part of an egalitarian writing approach.
This article proposes a theoretical and epistemological reconceptualization of professional development in education grounded in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and the Change Laboratory methodology. It challenges dominant approaches that conceptualize professional development as an individual, adaptive process focused on skills acquisition and instructional improvement. Instead, professional development is theorized as a collective, historical, and conflictual process of qualitative transformation of activity systems. Activity is identified as the relevant dialectical unit of development, understood as a systemic, mediated, and object-oriented formation evolving through historically constituted contradictions. From this perspective, development does not consist of incremental improvement but of expansive reorganization of professional activity. The article further argues that the Change Laboratory provides a methodological framework for supporting this form of development by fostering transformative agency, collective future-oriented modeling, and explicit engagement with the politico-ethical dimensions of educational change.
This article revisits a research design implemented in mental health to explore patient participation in care. Grounded in the paradigm of collaborative research, the methodology combines prolonged field immersion, group analysis method, and documentary analysis. This approach provides a nuanced understanding of interactions among stakeholders as well as the in situ processes of knowledge co-construction. A reflexive examination of the research design highlights the complexity of collaborative dynamics and the crucial role of boundary objects in facilitating dialogue between different forms of knowledge. It also reveals the challenges inherent in a truly participatory approach, particularly in managing power asymmetries and fostering mutual recognition of expertise. These findings underscore the transformative potential of collaborative research in mental health while identifying the obstacles to its effective implementation, thereby contributing to ongoing debates on the epistemology of knowledge co-construction in this field.
