The “school disciplines”: ways of thinking about the world
Up to the end of the 19th century, in France, “school discipline” referred to the “policing of establishments”, or a way of ensuring order in classes and schools. What we call “school disciplines” was represented by the terms “branches” or “school subjects”. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that the term appeared in its current form, and it did so following a double debate. The first of these debates began in the middle of the 19th century: it concerned the usefulness of classical studies and persuaded their defenders to place emphasis on the value of ancient languages as a “gymnastic” exercise or intellectual “discipline”. The second debate came into being during the years 1870-1880 and focussed on the renewal of primary teaching: its overriding plan was not only to impart knowledge, but to educate or “discipline” children’s intelligence. The term “school discipline” which emerged from this, came to mean any teaching subject that could serve as an intellectual exercise, by the beginning of the 20th century. Through their intended purpose of providing intellectual training, “school disciplines”, were distinct from scientific disciplines or reference disciplines and were seen to be constructs, products of school and its educational objectives (A. Chervel, 1988). The emergence of school disciplines also bears witness to the long-standing debate, still relevant today, between the advocates of “instruction” and those of “education”. In higher education, another type of tension appeared. Should priority be given to subject-based knowledge that is “relatively basic and disinterested” (Duval, 2013), and/or skills that can be immediately applied to professional life, whether they are strictly subject-based or not? It is within this context that we can identify and question the emergence of notions such as soft-skills and interdisciplinary skills that are sometimes free from faculty-related fields.
Be that as it may, from pre-primary teaching to higher education, school disciplines constitute one of the mediums through which the School conveys the tools that are relevant to the culture it is steeped in and through which it moulds the mind of its members. They therefore constitute one of the vehicles of education that must be conceived as “aiding young humans in learning to use the tools of memory making and reality construction” (J. Bruner, 1996, p. 36). They are therefore inevitably rooted in the culture whose subjects they are supposed to incorporate.
At the start of the 21st century, school continues to be affected by the emergence, a century ago, of “school disciplines”. But have the values and objectives ascribed to them evolved? What are the main areas of focus of this “intellectual discipline” that each “school discipline” is attempting to develop today? What are the repercussions of this project on the pupils’ ways of thinking? In what way and how effectively”? To what extent do the teachers adhere to the “disciplinary model” of the pupils in their care? To what extent is this persistence of “discipline” reassessed by the emergence of interdisciplinarity?
The communications will explore this problem from one or several angles from among those suggested below, and in the context of one or several educational systems and one or several disciplines.
Angles of analysis
1. What are the objectives and which underpin this conception of taught disciplines? What arguments are used to support it? What are the objections to it? …
2. What are the historical roots of the emergence of the different school disciplines? What elements are they made up of? At which point can they be considered as ways of thinking about the world? Under the effect of which factors and on whose initiative? …
3. What are the constituent key elements of these different ways of thinking about, explaining, and looking at the world, both in terms of the canonical school disciplines and in the “new disciplines” that constitute “educations for”? What differentiates or unites the different school disciplines? What language practices underpin and allow us to identify school disciplines? …
4. Is it necessary to continue to think of the world from a subject-based viewpoint? Does Interdisciplinarity mean the end of disciplines? Is it possible to implement interdisciplinary approaches without abandoning the plan to teach ways of looking at disciplines? On what conditions? With what results, especially with regard to teaching ways of looking at disciplines? …
5. What didactic devices seem to be best suited to teaching the different ways of thinking inherent to disciplines? In what conditions and with what effects on the pupils? …
6. What obstacles complicate or prevent the learning of ways of thinking about disciplines? How can they be diagnosed? How can they be remedied? …
7. Do TICs represent a new way of expanding the consecutive teaching of ways of looking at disciplines? Under what conditions and with what results? To what extent do they change the ways of thinking inherent to disciplines? …
8. How can evaluation anchor the learning of ways of thinking about disciplines? How can the learning of these modes of thinking be evaluated? How can coherence be ensured between the ways of thinking, both taught and evaluated? …
9. Is it necessary to train teachers to impart learning about the ways of thinking about disciplines? What teaching devices should be given priority? In what conditions and with what results? …
10. What importance can be attached to the subject-based ways of thinking in the representations that teachers have with regard to the discipline they are teaching? To what extent do these ways of thinking form the constituent elements of their professional identity? …
Call for participation
The communicators will be able to demonstrate research of a varied, epistemological, empirical and technological nature, but also diagnostic studies, method studies, action-research… Their areas of research will involve subject didactics, philosophy, sociology, history, education sciences…
These communications will take four forms:
- a symposium which will bring together at least three communications from the communicators of two different higher education establishments;
- an individual communication (20 minutes) which will be set by the committee organiser in the panels;
- a workshop (1h30) during which the communicator will have to “bring to life” a didactic device for the participants and allow them to analyse the effects…. To maintain a distance…
- a poster which will be presented during a session designed for this purpose.
The communications will take place in French or English. The communicators who use English will be requested to present a slideshow in French and informal exchanges on the premises will be in French.
