Vol 7 - Issue 1

Educations

List of Articles

At a time when media debates about schools are oscillating between a race to reform, a return to radicalism or even a fantasised former republican school, and when didactics - the fields of research and practice that aim to build a ’bridge’ between the sciences with explanatory aims and the appropriation of their results by a variety of audiences - are too often locked in technical debates and excesses, there is an urgent need to think about the expected changes from the point of view of content too, with a view to containing the endemic crisis of contemporary schools faced with a loss of meaning and clear aims. The science of sustainability, as an emerging academic trend, is therefore challenging the didactics of existing school subjects in terms of their content and methods, in a necessary updating in line with these academic developments. It offers these disciplines and their didactics an opportunity for renewal.

We examine the specific contributions of education for the Anthropocene in the face of ecological and climatic crises in the context of environmental education on the one hand, and educational research on the other. The emergence of the current trend in education for the Anthropocene is positioned between education for, which is the result of political orders to the world’s education systems, and socially topical issues, which correspond to a current of research focused on renewing the relationship between science and society in education. Between permanence, rupture and continuity, education in the time of the Anthropocene questions the school form, taking into account contexts and territories and curricular legitimacies.

In a knowledge-based economy, the field of higher education is in high demand. This is to ensure a strong production capacity for globally competitive innovations. This geo-economic context upsets educational issues by requiring citizens to raise their level of skills and knowledge in a logic of performance. This study tends to show how the European Union relies on curricula to transform the democratization of higher education into a process of selection of human capital. It tends to show that curricular fragmentation is a strategy that draws its legitimacy from the meritocratic fiction, favoring in the background a massification of qualified human resources in a soft power perspective of the European model of the knowledge society.

In a context of globalization, education and training are vectors for the dissemination of standardized academic knowledge, aimed at making nations and institutions adhere to the same values and curricular design. This article brings out the political issues of the internationalization of curricula via the ERASMUS programs aimed at third countries, here marroco and Lebanon. We will understand this questioning through a case study, the EduBiomed program, which is interested in the university training of actors in Mediterranean biosphere reserves. We will analyze the European Union’s internationalization strategies, the managerial challenges of training and research via projects, those of pluriculturalism in training, and those of the curricular fragmentation processes.

This article questions the role that farmers can play in environmental education aiming an ecological transition. Considering that farmers are key actors of environmental controversies, the article postulates that the study of the pedagogical practices they develop can contribute to renewing perspectives on environmental education and its implementation. Based on an inductive and exploratory approach, it describes and seeks to understand these pedagogical practices. In order to do so understanding the farming production system is essential. Through this dual description of agricultural and educational practices, this article highlights the important role of farmers promoting an environmentally friendly system in the territorial ecological transition. In conclusion, he highlights the limitations of these practices which have few collective dimensions and remain focused on the modification of individual behaviours and on a tourist audience.

The aim of this article is to identify the main levers and obstacles to the development of a learning territory in agroecology, with a view to determining the main guidelines needed to develop relevant school and training curricula. This alignment of existing curricula with societal evolutions in the places and modalities of knowledge production is necessary to equip territories to meet the challenges of our probable entry into the Anthropocene. The article is based on case studies carried out in Tunisia. They provide the basis for the renewal of school curricula and agronomic training using a robust frame of reference.

The contribution questions the possible conflict of values present in a local heritage education project. The study is the result of a local partnership between the National Education and a regional natural park of the Hautes-Alpes. It aims to identify whether a conflict of values, within the framework of a local heritage education among primary school students, leads to the emergence and transmission to students of values sometimes contrary to the ideal of the French Republican School. The various axiological elements were collected by the analysis of the Charter of a regional natural park, documentation on the heritage object concerned, official texts of the National Education, traces produced by the class and interviews with the students and then with the teacher. The axiological components of this type of project show the diversity and complexity of this set of values involved. From the point of view of identity values, a conflict of values was created when it did not exist, on the contrary, in the text of the project.

This work aims to understand the conditions of emergence of an ecological consciousness by studying the potential of participatory devices in children’s activism, seeking to understand how these devices problematize and how they address the environmental issues of the local forest in Portugal. The pedagogical activity described here involved twenty-two ten-year-old children, enrolled in the fourth year of the first cycle of primary education, for three consecutive months, in moments of interactive participation and in a logic of action-reflection. Based on a community-based approach, the children studied the local forest and were involved in a process of exploring problems and finding solutions to problems they identified as relevant. Data were collected using various devices: logbooks, drawings and projects developed by children; photographs, process videos and the investigator’s field notes containing recordings of joint discussions with children and informal conversations with families; semi-structured interviews with teachers. The analysis shows that children play the role of environmental agents with militant practices, for example collective actions they have developed in the forest. There was also a call for partnerships in the community to address local environmental issues and to organize a community event to be heard. Learning in forests has not only made children aware of the impact of the dominant anthropocentric vision on sustainability but has also motivated them to implement their environmental activism.

After presenting the theoretical framework of the question of the meaning of the terms «formal education», «informal» and «non-formal» more often used than defined, the article describes the implementation of a pedagogical project called «shared garden», conducted in a SEGPA classroom at a rural college. The aim was to create a space where students can grow fruits, vegetables, flowers and plants together, mobilizing a certain amount of knowledge on biodiversity, resource management, the life cycle of plants and the importance of sustainable agriculture. The commitment of the pupils in the project led them to leave the school and to turn to other sources of knowledge and know-how than that which the traditional school form could offer them. In a final part, the authors return to the entanglement of the pedagogical models implemented and their meaning. It appears that the project is a non-formal education in that it is in the middle of a segment whose cursor begins its translation on the informal side, borrows the teaching methods of non-formal education to finally lead to a formalization of knowledge made so transposable to other contexts. This method seems particularly suitable for education at the time of the Anthropocene insofar as it trains citizens aware of the planetary stakes of their acts and able to build new knowledge by them-even and through cooperation and sharing with others.