Décentralisation de l’éducation en Afrique francophone de l’Ouest : Réalités et défis au niveau local

THE DECENTRALISATION OF EDUCATION IN WESTERN FRANCOPHONE AFRICA: LOCAL-LEVEL REALITIES AND CHALLENGES – For some years now, the process of decentralisation has been a popular means of reforming the way that public services are administrated. This ambitious and complex means of reform has been embraced by a number of very different countries. However, questions have arisen concerning the ability of the local authorities and schools – two of the main beneficiaries of this reform – to carry out the administrative duties involved. Many doubt that its impact is far-reaching enough. As a result, the IIEP has coordinated a research programme in Western Francophone Africa with the aim of gaining greater insight into the challenges facing local authorities and schools in the context of decentralisation reforms. To a certain extent, the results are discouraging because they show the limits facing those who attempt to implement a policy of decentralisation, although a number of successful examples of innovation do give grounds for hope. For this reason, the results enable us to identify several principles for good practice.     

L’éducation en prison à la périphérie de l’éducation pour tous

International Review of Education - Prison education on the margins of education for all – Prison education is an issue which would benefit from a more active role of initiative on the part...     

Le problème de léducation des parents

Sans résumé

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Parent education

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Le Problème de L'éducation des Parents Elternerziehung

     

Socialisation interculturelle et dynamiques identitaires chez les jeunes adultes issus de l’immigration maghrébine en France

Cette étude analyse différentes orientations identitaires manifestées par des jeunes issus de l’immigration maghrébine en France en rapport avec leurs conditions de socialisation. L’identité est envisagée dans ses dimensions d’identification culturelle, d’estime de soi et du rapport actif ou passif à la réalité. La socialisation est étudiée du point de vue des modalités d’inter construction de l’éducation familiale et de l’expérience scolaire. Une enquête par questionnaire est réalisée auprès de 120 jeunes agés de 18-25 ans, des deux sexes, issus d’un milieu ouvrier. Une analyse multivariée (Classification Hiérarchique Descendante) permet de dégager la structure de quatre groupes en termes de différentiation ou d’assimilation, et pour chacune conformante ou individuante. Les stratégies équilibrant préoccupations ontologiques et pragmatiques paraissent s’insérer dans des dynamiques d’affirmation de soi du sujet et de son autonomie. L’enracinement dans une certaine tradition religieuse para?t dans ces cas compatible avec la modernité et constitue un facteur d’équilibre psychologique et d’intégration sociale.     

Modalités de prise de décision chez les filles et les garçons en la présence ou en l’absence de l’enseignant

How girls and boys take decisions in the presence and absence of a teacher – This work is part of an innovative approach to physical and sports education in Tunisia, and team sports in particular. It uses language studies carried out within the framework of this teaching both to generate a reflective attitude on the part of students, and to identify the effect of gender as a variable in the ways in which they make decisions. Discourse analysis highlights the importance of language output by girls and boys in football teaching when a teacher is present or absent. The teacher is an institutional authority who imposes specific uses of language, and when he/she is absent, emotional tensions predominate and may reflect the repression of ideas that occurs when the teacher is present. Although girls appear to take part in the discussion, their utterances are fewer in number, and their analytical statements less effective than those of boys. Girls never gain the upper hand over boys. The study also suggests a redefinition of social role divisions on the basis of gender – masculinity and femininity.     

éducation, Dialogue Interculturel et Société de L’information

EDUCATION, INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY – The present study examines the contribution of education to developing the potentials of intercultural dialogue. The author reflects on educational means for distinguishing between, on one hand, universalization and, on the other, the elimination of particularity at a time of increasing cultural exchange. He presents some thoughts on the fundamentals of ethics for intercultural dialogue at school, examining difficulties in multicultural dialogue or its eventual risks. The study also addresses the conditions for producing and spreading educational messages, their quality, and the content necessary for reinforcing dialogue, as well as the interconnections between education and technology. Finally, the author identifies possible ways to avoid transforming dialogue into an ideological instrument or accepting an exclusive economic, financial or technical logic.     

Trois élèves en difficulté devant des situations de réunion et de complément d'ensembles

The purpose of this research was to improve the understanding of 'problems involving combination and complementation';. We presented four different situations to three children with learning difficulties. An analysis of their initial mental representations, procedures, and reflections provided insight as to their thinking process. These mental representations dealt with numbers. They are first seen as physical objects such as representations of quantities, and this influences the choice of procedures to solve the problem. These processes led to the coordination of numbers and relationships within the proposed situation. This shows the impact of the logico-mathematical relation of inclusion. More economical procedures of counting and mental calculation emerge. Hence, we can distinguish solving from understanding.Racute;SUMacute;. Le but de cette étude vise l'amélioration des connaissances eu égard à la construction d'une compréhension de la résolution des situations de réunion et de complément d'ensembles. Nous avons présenté quatre situations diff'rentes à trois enfants en difficulté d'apprentissage. L'étude de leurs représentations mentales initiales, de leurs procédures et de leurs réflexions nous invitent à en apprécier l'évolution. Ainsi, pour ces élèves, les représentations mentales qui émergent de la situation proposée, portent sur les nombres. Ces derniers sont d'abord vus comme objets physiques, puis comme représentants d'une quantité d'objets, ce qui influence le choix des procédures. Les premières réflexions les invitent à coordonner les nombres et les relations entre eux. Nous voyons apparaître l'impact de la relation logico-mathématique d'inclusion. Des procédures plus économiques de comptage et de calcul mental émergent. Nous pouvons alors distinguer la simple résolution d'un problème de la compréhension de ce type de situation.     

Formation des formateurs?: place dans une ��ducation de qualit�� des adultes

Training the trainers: its role in high-quality adult education ?C This article is about the crucial role of instructor training; it discusses the implications for the quality of adult learning and education. The documents arising out of CONFINTEA V and VI, the Hamburg Declaration, the Agenda for the Future and the Belém Framework for Action all recognise the critical role played by facilitators and adult instructors in the quality of adult learning and education. However, all over the world, they are undertrained and poorly paid by comparison with their counterparts in the formal education sector. In West Africa, where the average literacy rate is 20%, the situation of these facilitators and instructors and the conditions in which they work are becoming alarming, particularly since actors?? expectations of them are constantly increasing. This article aims to clarify the most important reasons for this marginalisation and then provides some key pieces of guidance on how to move forward in terms of the political context, the literate environment, skills and languages, curricula, teaching methods and learner needs, materials, monitoring and evaluation and research.     

Réflexions sur l'évolution de l'enseignement de la biologie en Afrique

Summaries

English

The main stages of the evolution of biology teaching in Africa, after the independence of the countries, have been a better adaptation of the curriculum contents to the natural and socio‐cultural environment of each country, i.e. to go beyond a simple formal adaptation and to conceive curricula closer to the needs of African societies, in line with their specific values, and fitting with the cultural level of the pupils and with the preoccupations associated with a peculiar economic and social environment; an improvement of the teaching conditions, which remain difficult due to the lack of teaching aids of all kinds; a promotion of educational research, thanks to the creation and the development of administrative bodies responsible for the training of teachers and for the supervision of their activities. African countries have universities, faculties or schools of education and teacher‐training institutes, which are in charge of the training of biology teachers for secondary schools; they also have adapted their programmes to their needs; but such in‐depth adaptation must continue, so that biology teaching responds better to social evolution, to the new conditions of economic and social change and to new ethical situations.

There remains a lot to be done in the area of elaboration and evaluation of teaching methods and techniques, bearing in mind the great difficulties of the teachers who lack the necessary minimum educational aids, specially in rural areas.

The UNESCO pilot project for the improvement of biology teaching in Africa (1966‐1972) is part of a series of projects dealing with the improvement of school programmes and sponsored by UNESCO. The teaching aids produced for the English‐speaking countries of Africa were a handbook and a teacher's guide concerning an initiation course of biology for the junior level of high schools, as well as a series of loop films for the classroom. The aids produced for the French‐speaking countries of Africa were for the senior level and included booklets and colour slides, for the teachers’ use and not the pupils'; the topics involved African ecology, plants and soils, introduction to human biology, conservation and preservation of biological resources.

As a contribution to the national endeavours of educational reform, UNESCO published in 1974 and 1975 the English, French and Spanish versions, adapted to Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, of a Teacher's guide on the biology of human populations. This meant to emphasize the necessary adaptation of biology teaching to its social and cultural environment, while presenting the human populations and their relations with their environments. This is a contemporary subject, which also allows the examination of the role of biology and biology teachers’ in the general awareness of environmental problems; a subject which does not need sophisticated equipment or teaching aids, but, rather, appeals to the observation skills of teachers and pupils.

It is true that the African experience has, to some extent, followed a trend which European countries acknowledged several years ago. Adaptation of curriculum content is a long‐term task and is pursued in both kinds of countries. The African experience could certainly be beneficial to European curriculum designers. The production of all kinds of teaching aids, of various degree of complexity, in the national language, as well as the evaluation of relevant teaching methods and techniques, are areas of acute shortage, where bilateral as well as multilateral assistance could be most fruitful.     

L’héritage de la méthode suédoise d’éducation physique en France: les conflits de méthode au sein de l’Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime de Joinville au début du XXème siècle

The Swedish physical education method has had a singular destiny in France. Originally created by the Swedish Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839), it first spread in France thanks to German doctors. From 1902, the Swedish method became the official method of the Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime de Joinville. It caused serious dissension first within the army, between Georges Hébert, a naval officer attempting to spread his own method called ‘Méthode naturelle’, and Emile Coste, a major at Joinville school who was a resolute supporter of Ling’s method; then within Joinville school, where, from 1905, Georges Demeny, renowned physiologist, tried to impose his French method ‘Eclectique’. The three protagonists would use arguments focused on the rationality of the Swedish method to legitimize or criticize it. But this explicit stake based on the validity of the link between a scientific culture – anatomy and physiology – and a physical education method does not mask the implicit stake of real power.     

Cinquante années de débats et de recherches sur l’école française

Two major factors have contributed to the evolution of French historiography in the history of education in the past 50 years. The first relates to the general orientation of public debate about schools, which has shifted from a paradigm concerning democratisation to one that focuses on student success rates and the efforts to eliminate inequalities of all sorts. The second factor that has affected scholarly orientations lies in changes linked to academic positioning between pedagogy, history, and the educational sciences in the context of increasing university hirings, at least until recently. These two changes in terms of scholarly paradigms and scholarly professional identities have encouraged the development of a certain number of approaches and questions: a reconsideration of the historic role of the State, an interest in a greater diversity of actors in the educational process, and a re-evaluation of the cognitive, cultural and social effects of teaching at all levels. Despite this, the history of education plays a minor role today in France, not only in teacher training but also in debates about the future of schools.     

Analyses de séances en classe et stabilité des pratiques d’enseignants de mathématiques expérimentés du second degré

In this paper we tackle the issue of an eventual stability of teachers’ activity in the classroom. First we explain what kind of stability is searched and how we look for the chosen characteristics: we analyse the mathematical activity the teacher organises for students during classroom sessions and the way he manages the relationship between students and mathematical tasks. We analyse three one-hour sessions for different groups of 11 year old students on the same content and with the same teacher, and two other sessions for 14 year old and 15 year old students, on analogous contents, with the same teacher (another one). Actually it appears in these two examples that the main stabilities are tied with the precise management of the tasks, at a scale of some minutes, and with some subtle characteristic touches of the teacher’s discourse. We present then a discussion and suggest some inferences of these results.

Peut-on apprendre la paix à l’école ? Une évaluation du cours « Éducation aux droits de l’homme et à la citoyenneté » (EDHC) en Côte d’Ivoire post-conflit

Can we learn peace at school? An evaluation of the “Human rights and Citizenship Education” (EDHC) course in post-conflict Ivory Coast – After the post-electoral crisis, the government of Ivory Coast introduced a course entitled “Human rights and citizenship education” (EDHC) to the lower secondary school curriculum to facilitate a societal transition to a culture of peace. This article, which examines the perceptions of course participants and their teachers, is based on a large-scale survey (n = 984), 25 focus groups and course observations carried out in Abidjan. An analysis of the course’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of the key players in the education system enables the authors to evaluate its effectiveness. They find that, despite the enthusiasm around this course, its lack of depth is preventing a change of mentality. In addition, the message of peace that the course strives to convey is compromised by school violence.     

Un exemple de cadre conceptuel pour létude de l'enseignement de la géométrie en formation des maîtres

We are interested in the teaching of geometry to primary school (children from 3 to 11) teachers. We define a priori a conceptual frame, which organises geometry upon three kinds of knowledge: intuition, experience and deduction. Drawing on Gonseth's works, we bring out three syntheses of elementary geometry: natural geometry (geometry I), natural axiomatic geometry (geometry II) and formalist axiomatic geometry (geometry III). Next we illustrate this conceptual frame with examples of teaching geometry. Last we bring out different conceptions of geometry in scholar system which could lead to cross purposes.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

L'histoire de l'éducation au Brésil: traditions historiographiques et processus de rénovation de la discipline

Since the end of the 1980s, Brazilian histoty of education bas been redefined by new historiographical currents. The process of redefinition has taken on particular characteristics because of theoretical and institutional factors involved in the evolution of the discipline as afield of research. The new trends run counter to the historiographical model that dominated the post‐graduate programmes in education of the main Brazilian universities since the 1970s. This model originated in the 1930s and 1940s with the publication of reference works for educational history research. The present essay examines the process of reconfiguration of the discipline with a view to evaluating the restrictions that were imposed upon it.