Aims

This course should allow the students :
- to analyse the links between cultural and economical inequalities;
- to assess the micro- and macro-sociological effects of teaching or formation actions and politics, being started either by institutions or by associations;
- to grasp the external determinations weighing on the systems of teaching and formation;
- to understand the behaviours of the actors inside the educational system;
- to discriminate and to joint critical analysis and axiological approach.

Main themes

The analysis bears on the link between the different stages : macrosocial (debates on the finalities of teaching and formation ; social groups and their educational practices ; webs and pillars, etc.), mesosocial (the schools, sections, classes and their hierarchy, the practical organisation of teaching and formation) and microsocial (the relations established by the actors in the frame of formation or teaching and their effects on the achievement).

Content and teaching methods

The central aim of the course is to allow the students to analyse the system of teaching and formation, here and now. It will only be achieved if they dispose of theoretical cues as well as of factual informations on this system. The course will thus aim to transmit the theoretical cues from the analysis of real situations, to help the students to grasp the particular architecture of our system of teaching and formation.
One of the important stakes is today to understand how the external influences contribute to the evolution of the national, community or regional politics and to locate their effects on the daily practices in all the institutions and organisations concerned. Moreover, the stake is to grasp how the particular interests succeed in compelling recognition and in giving directions to these politics. In the lectures, as in the case analyses, the course aims at enlightening the reciprocal influences between the stages.
Another stake is to understand the relation of the individuals with the know-how and the formation, according to their path and to their position in the social relations, to their culture and to their experience.
A third stake is to analyse the relation with the rules of the game and with the distance to the roles in the frame of the interactions between actors inside the educational institutions.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

It follows educational methods fitted for adults including the link between theory and practice, group work, formative assessment and steps of individual and group appropriation of the contents.
Illustrations from the various fields of education and from adults formation : continuous education, specialized education, school field, etc.

Programmes in which this activity is taught