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The goal of parkour is to cross various obstacles in an efficient and creative way by jumping, swinging, climbing, and running. Parkour aligns with the SHAPE America national standards for K-12 physical education and has demonstrated its potential to highly engage both boys and girls in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). In this article, we present a knowledge packet for teaching parkour to elementary children. First, we discuss the knowledge packet by unpacking the content development together with common errors and suggestions on how to correct these. Next, we propose appropriate equipment that can be used during physical education lessons. After which we introduce organizational and pedagogical principles that strengthen the parkour unit, such as focused station work, modifying content and equipment and offering children high practice opportunities and the role of teacher's content knowledge. We end the paper by providing examples for assessing children in a formative and summative way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, this paper explores how mid-level actors interpret and translate curriculum policies in the context of growing concerns about the performance and accountability of education systems. Little is known about the work of recontextualization agents responsible for the professional development, support and control of teachers, uniquely positioned at the interface of policy and practice, and comparative perspectives are even scarcer. Based on empirical research in France and Canada (Quebec), this paper examines the work of pedagogic advisors and inspectors intervening at lower secondary school level. Data are drawn from interviews (n = 24) conducted in three mid-level school authorities. Our comparative analysis brings to the fore specific forms of recontextualization in each education system. In particular it shows important variations in the use of knowledge based on experience and observation and decontextualized knowledge drawing on research and statistical data. Agents also elaborate different discursive strategies projecting contrasting models of teaching. In both contexts, but to varying degrees, the rise of data and 'evidence' is reshaping the missions of mid-level actors, potentially eroding professional discretion and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History of education reveals that the perimeter of a school subject as well as the manner of teaching it may vary according to the time period, the country, its political situation and its economic needs. Furthermore, if it clearly depends on the level of the learners and on the school itself, sometimes the teacher's preoccupations can adapt it. This paper addresses the teaching of 'physics' in secondary schools in eighteenth-century France. It examines how 'physics' emerged from Natural Philosophy, as a scientific subject and then as a school subject. Before the French Revolution (1789), 'experimental physics' was taught in some royal schools. The revolution presented the opportunity to reorganise the whole education system and to follow Enlightenment ideas. How did that impact on the status of 'physics' in the newly created schools? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenomenon: The urgency of having fair and trustworthy competency-based assessment in medical training is growing. Simulation is increasingly recognized as a potent method for building and assessing applied competencies. The growing use of simulation and its application in summative assessment calls for comprehensive and rigorously designed programs. Defining the current baseline of what is available and feasible is a crucial first step. This paper uses anesthesia and intensive care (AIC) in France as a case study in how to document this baseline. Approach: An IRB-approved, online anonymous closed survey was submitted to AIC residency program directors and AIC simulation program directors in France from January to February 2021. The researcher-developed survey consisted of 65 questions across five sections: centers' characteristics, curricular characteristics, courses' characteristics, instructors' characteristics, and simulation perceptions and perspectives. Findings: The participation rate was 31/31 (100%) with 29 centers affiliated with a university hospital. All centers had AIC simulation activities. Resident training was structured in 94% of centers. Simulation uses were training (100%), research and development (61%), procedural or organizational testing (42%), and summative assessment (13%). Interprofessional full-scale simulation training existed in 90% of centers. Procedural training on simulators prior to clinical patients' care was performed "always" in 16%, "most often" in 45%, "sometimes" in 29% and "rarely" or "not" in 10% of centers. Simulated patients were used in 61% of centers. Main themes were identified for procedural skills, full-scale and simulated patient simulation training. Simulation activity was perceived as increasing in 68% of centers. Centers expressed a desire to participate in developing and using a national common AIC simulation program. Insights: Based on our findings in AIC, we demonstrated a baseline description of nationwide simulation activities. We now have a clearer perspective on a decentralized approach in which individual institutions or regional consortia conduct simulation for a discipline in a relatively homogeneous way, suggesting the feasibility for national guidelines. This approach provides useful clues for AIC and other disciplines to develop a comprehensive and meaningful program matching existing expectations and closing the identified gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the curricular change in French universities that has taken place over the last two decades and especially since the implementation of the LMD Reform in 2002. Curricula tend to become 'regionalised-knowledge' courses, by regrouping disciplinary knowledge and looking forward to economic and social needs. The article aims at analysing the process of producing this change. The first proposition is to show that change is not a linear process, but an ongoing process of negotiation undertaken by a wide range of institutions, social groups and agents, who operate in different institutional levels (European-level, State-level, university/local-level or pedagogic/local-level). The second proposition is that these negotiation procedures mask the differences in the social basis of each one of these discourses and, thus, mask conflict and struggle over social control in higher education reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale: Public health and preventive medicine (PHPM) has been recognized internationally as a physician specialty, but national parallels and differences exist between training contexts. This paper reviews PHPM training and employment in Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Methods: Information gathered from relevant accreditation bodies and literature searches was used to create descriptive profiles of national training demographics and structure and a narrative outlining trends and challenges facing the specialty. Results: Notable similarities and differences exist between national contexts. Key themes were differences in training strategies and practice scope, specialty stakeholders, certification structure, and funding. Recognition challenges faced the specialty across all six countries. Other challenges included unclear competencies and training strategies and a need for PHPM specialists to highlight their role in combating population health threats. Additional differences existed between comparator countries on the structure of training, funding sources for training programs, availability of training posts, and linkages with other physician specialties. Conclusion: Highlighting these themes is a first step to fostering training collaborations between PHPM specialist physicians to augment transnational action on global public health challenges and also supports PHPM physician educators with innovative solutions from abroad that might address domestic specialty challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Claude Grignon's empirical study of lower levels of vocational education in France. The concepts of technical culture and the morality of technical processes are explored Grignon argues that the hidden curriculum of the Lycée for vocational education (Lycée d'Enseignement Professionel) socialises students into a world view in which social relations are conflated with technical relations, and take on the appearance of the certainty of technical processes. Social control is exerted by excluding the possibility of ambiguity and change from this deterministic frame of reference. In the second part of the paper we seek to show that some of Grignon's analytic concepts may offer useful perspectives for analysing British Further Education curricula, by applying the concepts of technical and `technicised' culture to some recent developments in British Further Education curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of ‘critical citizenship’ has become a key objective of official school curricula around the world. Using an analytic framework developed by the authors, this paper identifies the diverse conceptions of critical citizenship that are promoted, by comparing the official school curricula for citizenship in England and France. The analysis goes beyond the dichotomous distinctions prevalent in comparisons of education in the two countries, especially those that focus on the contrasting degrees of centralisation–decentralisation, and suggests that there were significant differences in the goals promoted in their curricula with regard to four key dimensions: ideology, the collective, the individual and action. While these differences reflect historical, political, social, economic and cultural differences between the two nations, the analysis indicates a lack of symmetry across the levels of the curriculum, which contributed to the significant spaces that were found to exist which have the potential for teachers and students to creatively interpret how critical citizenship can be understood and implemented in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article notes international serials and electronic resource management news for July 1, 2012. The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services' Continuing Resources Section presented the Ulrich’s Serials Librarianship Award to Valerie Bross. The North American Serials Interest Group's newly elected officers include Joyce Tenney, Shana McDonald, and Chris Brady. The Library of Congress' Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan is on its website at http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/pdf/bibframework-10312011.pdf.

My aim in this paper is to show the relevance of an 'effective semiotics'; that is, a field study based upon Peirce's semiotics. The general context of this investigation is educational semiotics rather than semiotics of teaching: I am concerned with a general approach of educational processes, not with skills and curricula. My paper is grounded in a field study that I carried out in a school, L'Ecole de la Neuville, implementing Institutional Pedagogy in France. I first investigate the relevance of Peirce's semiotics in such a context. I then propose several definitions for the word 'institution', referring to the core concepts of this particular pedagogy, before describing the concept of 'institution-sign', which is considered a useful tool for making effective connections between several aspects of semiotics. I finally assert that an institution constitutes a tool that allows teachers to favour semiosis in educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to identify how upper secondary school French students (Grade 10-12) interpret chemical transformation with regards to the changes within molecules and atoms, and in terms of intramolecular and/or intermolecular bond breaking. In order to identify and describe the students' assimilated knowledge, four questions were asked to 930 students using a written questionnaire submitted a long time after the related teaching took place. There is much research into student learning in the concept areas discussed here (atoms and molecules, chemical change, chemical bonding), as reviewed in the paper. The present study presents data from an educational system where limited work has been reported in the international literature. The French system has its own unique curriculum, and is taught in the national language (where much of the existing research has concerned learning in Anglophile systems). The research reported here found that French secondary students experienced many similar difficulties in understanding these key scientific concepts to those that have been reported elsewhere, showing the cross-cultural nature of the key educational issues. For example, many have difficulties in understanding the changes undergone by atoms and molecules in the course of a chemical reaction; many are not able to justify explicitly the breaking of inter-molecular bonds and to interpret the breaking of intramolecular bonds in terms of reorganization of atoms, the target level of understanding in the curriculum from the end of Grade 9. However, it is also suggested that some of the specific characteristics identified here are linked to the ordering and language used in the French curriculum, and such cultural idiosyncrasies may offer useful insights into both problematic and valuable aspects of science pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates to the development of non-technical education (and to ethics) in engineering curricula in Europe and particularly in France. Two projects being followed at the Centre de recherche en éthique de l'ingénieur (CREI) at the Catholic University of Lille (France) are discussed: the first is an engineering ethics course which has been running for 6 years in a state engineering school, where there is a strong emphasis on analysing the ethical issues of the students' first work experience. The second has to do with the writing of a European handbook on engineering ethics which gives us good insight into how engineering ethics as a discipline is shaped by the cultural background of those who develop it (dominant philosophical tradition, religious background, the way the engineering profession is organized and education). Two main approaches seem to be prevalent in Europe today: the first relates to professional ethics as discussed in the USA since the 1950s, the second relates to a new discipline that is developing in Europe, that of the ethics of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is based on a lecture held at the 29th IGIP Symposium (annual conference) in Biel (Switzerland). This conference took place at the HTA Biel (University for applied sciences) under the title 'Unique and Excellent'. The paper takes up the old question: What should be present in an engineering curriculum, and who should decide? The author tries an overview based on the contributed lectures he had to handle while assembling the proceedings of the symposium. He also includes current tendencies in general and attitudes of students. In particular, he deals with the current trend for direct utility in engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the integration of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the French educational system and more especially in primary schooling. The research question concerns the purposes, the form of integration and the definition of the content of ESD. To answer these questions, I present and analyse the main features of these three questions as presented in the official texts of the Ministry of Education. I also draw on a case study focusing on the integration of ESD at primary level. Thirty-four semi-directive interviews were carried out with local ESD actors working in two communes in southern France. In this study, the interviews were subjected to thematic analysis using NVivo 12 software. The results show that, both in the official texts and in the discourse of the interviewees, the purposes of ESD tend to be civic and emancipatory. Furthermore, while the choice of content is left to the actors on the ground, the incoherence and lack of clarity of the official texts complicates their task. They thus have difficulty in setting ESD projects within an interdisciplinary approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how best to interest students of History in restoring their knowledge of French after a period of neglect. It suggests that these students are best motivated by an appeal to their response to historical issues, and therefore that classes should be based on texts used as working documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored the use of field trips for educational and teaching purposes by French kindergarten, primary-school teachers and natural science teachers in secondary schools. More specifically, we studied field trips in a natural environment by undertaking a French curriculum analysis and surveying teachers. We examined the responses of 511 teachers about their practices and motivations, as well as the levers and barriers to implementing these field trips. Results showed that this practice is widespread at all years of education, and differences between years seem to be related to the curriculum. We found few differences in learning motivations (reasons/objectives and interests/specific feature) and perceived barriers between different school teachers. Indeed, the teachers' motivations are essentially scientific and rooted in a scientific inquiry approach. Studying 'on real' was the interest most often cited by teachers, essentially for the purpose of scientific learning. The only notable difference we found concerns the levers for implementing the field trips: a larger proportion of kindergarten and primary-school teachers see field trips as an ideal support for environmental and sustainable development educations. These results are dependant of the French official curriculum which plays a key role in influencing the current implementation of school-organised field trips by the teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is a key component to the success and longevity of companies. Our research opens the ‘black box’ of creativity and innovation in R&D teams. We argue that understanding the nature of R&D projects in terms of creativity/innovation, efficiency/inefficiency, is important for designing education policies and improving engineering curriculum. Our research addresses the inventive design process, a lesser known aspect of the innovation process, in 197 R&D departments of industrial sector companies in France. One fundamental issue facing companies is to evaluate processes and results of innovation. Results show that the evaluation of innovation is confined by a lack of methodology of inventive projects. We will be establishing the foundations of a formal ontology for inventive design projects and finally some recommendations for engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1924 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a volume investigating the teaching of school history in former belligerent states in Europe. The project sought to reconcile former enemies through mutual understanding and educational exchange and reflected a widely held belief that although the military conflict had finished, its ideas still resounded and served to perpetuate antagonism. The CEIP project, conceived in the internationalist spirit, was itself derailed by nationalist enmity, a consequence of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, demonstrating the limits of cultural reconciliation in the early 1920s, and the resultant volume showed that belligerent views of recent history were still being taught to schoolchildren in France and Germany in the early 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In West Africa, as in Majority World countries, people with a communication disability are generally cut-off from the normal development process. A long-term involvement of two partners (Orthophonistes du Monde and Handicap International) allowed the implementation in 2003 of the first speech-language pathology qualifying course in West Africa, within the Ecole Nationale des Auxiliaires Medicaux (ENAM, National School for Medical Auxiliaries) in Lome, Togo. It is a 3-year basic training (after the baccalaureate) in the only academic training centre for medical assistants in Togo. This department has a regional purpose and aims at training French-speaking African students. French speech-language pathology lecturers had to adapt their courses to the local realities they discovered in Togo. It was important to introduce and develop knowledge and skills in the students' system of reference. African speech-language pathologists have to face many challenges: creating an African speech and language therapy, introducing language disorders and their possible cure by means other than traditional therapies, and adapting all the evaluation tests and tools for speech-language pathology to each country, each culture, and each language. Creating an African speech-language pathology profession (according to its own standards) with a real influence in West Africa opens great opportunities for schooling and social and occupational integration of people with communication disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article examines the social and cultural dimension of activity, which we propose to call configuration, in reference to Elias’ works. These configurations are characterized by: (1) stability (they do not change a lot); (2) security (for the teacher who can rely on school habits); (3) invisibility (teachers are not aware of them); (4) incorporation (they are culturally inherited); (5) community share (they are common to most teachers around the world). We illustrate these characteristics in two different contexts, each one taken in primary school: in France, in a classroom where the teacher uses a work by contract (seatwork); and in Mexico in a context of reform of the curriculum. These configurations are, simultaneously, conditions of formal learning and objects, which must be informally learned; in spite of their permanency, we try to investigate the conditions of possibility of configuration transformation: lifelong learning is one of these conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we outline the challenges facing French Studies in regional Australian universities resulting from an increasingly vocational curriculum and doubts about the cost-effectiveness of language learning in higher education. These pressures have resulted in a process of discipline restructuring and significant cuts in the numbers of staff teaching French Studies. The other major consequence outlined is the dislocation that has taken place in the link between teaching and research as academics with interests in the traditional aspects of French Studies have found their roles restricted to the delivery of low-level communicative language classes. Despite these considerable challenges, we offer a hint of optimism to colleagues in the discipline based on evidence from an increasing body of research into the impact of approaches to language teaching that combine traditional face-to-face instruction and online learning. In our opinion, this blended approach offers French Studies in the regions, not to mention other language disciplines, an opportunity to address the efficiency agenda and, at the same time, help to rebuild disciplinary breadth by re-establishing the link between teaching and research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The organisation of teacher training was thoroughly transformed in France in 2010. This transformation was the consequence of three interrelated reforms: the requirement of a Master's degree for all teachers, the new recruitment process for teachers and the integration of teacher training colleges (IUFM) into the universities. Universities are now responsible for providing initial training in programmes leading to a Master's degree. The state school system then recruits graduates through a competitive examination and newly recruited teachers are offered 'deferred initial training', the exact content and duration of which have not yet been fully specified. By looking at the former conditions of training and at the new organisation, it is, however, possible to outline the content and purpose of this further training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 45 years, two major trends have characterised French educational policies: a voluntary move towards widening access to upper secondary school and a related diversification of the diplomas available at the end of it, especially through the creation of the technological baccalaureat in 1968 and the vocational baccalaureat in 1985. In the context of educational expansion, to what extent are these successive reforms of upper secondary education curriculum associated with changes in classed and gendered trajectories through the system? Our empirical evidence is derived from four large-scale longitudinal surveys, which have never been analysed together yet: the 1962-1972 INED survey (N=15,154), 1980-1990 Panel study (N=19,701), 1989-2001 Panel study (N=20,524) and 1995-2006 Panel study (N=17,157). We use advanced log-linear and log-multiplicative models on contingency tables. We find that, when baccalaureat is measured as a dichotomy between holders and non-holders, class inequality has decreased since the 1960s. However, when subtler differentiations between baccalaureat types are taken into account, the strength of class inequality is shown to be constant over time, supporting Lucas's (2001) 'Effectively Maintained Inequality' hypothesis. Further results related to change in the pattern of inequality at the baccalaureat level, especially gendered class inequality, are also presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how questions of religion have impinged on or informed various dimensions of culture-shaping policy in France. Firstly, it considers not only how religious references have been orchestrated in high-level attempts to frame secular national identities, but also how such processes have assumed quasi-religious forms and functions. Secondly, it analyses the changing place of religion in French educational curricula and recent contested endeavours to introduce it as a cultural 'fact' into those curricula. Thirdly, the article examines influential framings of art policies in their relation to religion. It considers the pivotal function of religious fragments and debris in Malraux's vision of the imaginary museum and the use by Bourdieu of sustained religious metaphors to describe the sacralizing dynamics of secular art world. Finally, the article examines, in a long-term perspective, the implicit and explicit cultural policies of religious bodies themselves in their attempts to act upon prevailing cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French university system is in crisis. After its dismantlement during the French revolution, its rebirth was progressive under the third republic (1871-1945). But it was only after 1968 that the current universities developed, with an autonomy that is strictly supervised by the state. Since 1986 all experiments at modernizing the management of universities have failed. A research crisis in 2004, followed by another one in the winter of 2006, demonstrated an urgent need to set up necessary reform. Several university leaders and politicians urged it. The law of August 2007 is a first step towards achieving these hopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In eighteenth-century France, François Cointeraux was as an advocate of pisé, a provincial technique that rammed pure earth into artificial stones. Economical and sturdy, pisé could be used for a variety of rural constructions, ranging from sheds to silos. To share this knowledge, Cointeraux founded the “School of Agritecture,” which combined agriculture (“agri-”) with architecture (“-tecture”), and taught students how to work the land for food and shelter. Despite its practical benefits, the hybrid curriculum was not adopted elsewhere, for its agrarian values ultimately proved incompatible with the interests of industrial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a discussion on NFI, an engineering curricula in France that aims to train higher technicians as engineers through vocational education. Importance of a capacity of synthesis for an engineer; Student engineers' need to acquire unfamiliar skills; Preparation of the engineer's thesis.

The article discusses various aspects of the French education relevant to current concerns in Great Britain. The author in this article has chosen three aspects of the French education for this discussion. These aspects relate to the sectors of primary secondary and higher education respectively. These aspects touch upon several areas of current concern to the British education system. Although the French have found solutions to such concerns but it is difficult to transpose it directly to the British system. Nevertheless, many aspects of the French system remain attractive to those seeking solutions in Britain. The interest of the British government's in the implementation of, what it has termed the National Curriculum would strike many who work in the French education system. It further notes that the merits of a firm central hand on what goes on in school is in a system that has had its own national curriculum ever since the setting up of universal state education. The strength of the decentralized system is supposedly the ability of those areas on the periphery to respond to local needs and thereafter to implement any solutions found. As a postscript to the issue of a national curriculum, it is worth remarking that the size of primary schools has long since ceased to cause the concern among the French inspectorate that it has among its British counterparts.

The article describes the situation regarding secondary and vocational schools in France after the implementation of the Haby Act. From the French perspective, the education of the less academic minority after the first two years of secondary schooling with its common curriculum has not yet been brought into line with the Haby reforms. However, majority of students stay in full-time general secondary education in the third and fourth years. Successful completion of the first cycle with the award of the Brevet d Études du Premier Cycle is a desirable goal for young people aiming at the middle levels of employment if not at higher education and the professions.

The article discusses key issues concerning sex education in France in 1974. Key issues discussed include an historical background on the introduction of sex education into the school curriculum, its impact on society that reverberates far beyond curricular reform, the dynamics of curricular change in a centralized system, the effects of external social pressures on schools and the active involvement of teachers' unions, parents' associations, issue-oriented groups and groups of mixed character in the development of sex-education curricula in France.