Search

The aim of this issue is to bring together contributions that question the places, roles and experiences of the actors in education. The eight articles are divided into two distinct but complementary groups. The first group invites to reflect on certain working modalities in collaborative research, by underlining that, nevertheless, their deployment is not without tensions and difficulties when it comes to the places and roles of each person. The second group proposes analyses that focus on the experiences of the actors and their effects in terms of professional development, transformation and learning. In both groups some of the virtues of collaboration between researchers in education have been showed, without falling into a form of angelism.

The article shows how two cohorts of students in a Master's degree in Education and Training at a College of Education problematize an intercultural situation when viewing the video called What kind of Asian are you? For students, problematization is difficult to achieve when it comes to questioning their own value judgments. We question their ways of identifying observables to establish the problem that arises in a staged intercultural situation. After presenting the theoretical framework of our study and the methodological protocol, we discuss the results of our analyses. These results provide a fresh thinking on new practices for intercultural training based on a device that focuses on problematization.

This interview with the members of the Giflex research group, created in 2020 at the University of Lorraine within the laboratory CNRS ATILF, focuses on the reflections of three teacher-researchers in Didactics of Language and Culture who are grappling with the notions of gender and feminism in their teaching. They address theoretical questions, as well as practical examples and present current research projects.

In this article, after having exposed a training device, we show through the results of a study, how students teachers develop intercultural competences (IC) in negotiated collective and individual writings about experienced microaggressions (Kyun, 2013). The students, working part-time in a classroom, are confronted with heterogeneous contexts in schools and subject to injunctions to respect others. Many researchers define IC as a reflexive and (self-)critical process that considers the context in which interlocutors interact. In an MEEF master's degree programme at a university in the Hauts-de-France, the pedagogical system of intercultural training is designed in coherence with this paradigm so that students develop ICs. The innovative training device challenges the dominant ideology surrounding ICs, namely the militancy for an idealized living together, through dialogue between students. Finally, the points of vigilance presented open doors for other university courses.

To cope with the growing diversity and linguistic heterogeneity of the student population at the University of Lorraine (UL), a self-directed English for (written) Academic Purposes course was designed in 2014 for the Master’s students of Didactique des langues/fle. Students can make progress at their own pace and benefit from personalised support. To complete this course, the students must write a long scientific text in English, making use of self-regulated practices and a variety of resources made available to them on the UL course platform. These resources support, on the one hand, the building of new knowledge and skills needed to successfully complete the required task, and on the other hand, learner autonomy and self-regulation steeped in cognitive and affective dimensions. For the purposes of this study, we will analyse the design of the support system offered as well as its effects, by making use of assessment questionnaires provided at the end of the semester. Results indicate that although the students found the course difficult, the efficiency of the aid to support their engagement and adherence to the required task, which are important ingredients of self-regulation. Among the different kinds of aids offered, students prefer those that involve direct oral or written interaction with the teacher, such as one-to-one advisory sessions and the logbook.

The notion of mediation is to be found in more and more areas of society, and in education going back several decades. Taking it as an approach in itself as well as a relationship between the various participants, we examine it here through the diversity of languages and cultures in French pre-schools.This study is based on observation of a language workshop in pre-school and on analysis of the teacher’s reflections on her own teaching style. The paper analyses the relationships of the different participants to the fields of knowledge, language and Otherness in their everyday life in an ordinary pre-school.The study sheds light on the changing roles of the teacher and the children during the language activity, on the management of the teaching episodes as they unfold, and on the dynamics of the linguistic and intercultural mediation created within the class. The results reveal the teacher’s beliefs about her teaching and knowledge in context. Her own filter occurs as an act of mediation which seems to prevail over expected professional routines.Beyond the concrete issues of teaching, our study identifies major conceptual issues in the notion of mediation developed in the context of language diversity in pre-schools. It contributes to research in language teaching by focusing on early learning from the perspective of complexity, fluidity and non-linear connections between the related notions

Many educators in immersion contexts support a policy of strict separation of languages in the classroom as the ideal model for second language acquisition and are reluctant to make connections between the dominant language, the target language and pupils' home languages. This can result in missed opportunities for drawing on pupils' entire linguistic repertoires to foster their learning The present study considers teachers' discourses surrounding the place and role of the dominant language (French), the target language (English) and home languages from the perspective of classroom teachers at one French primary school with a school-wide English immersion program participating in a collaborative research project. Since the program's inception in 2011, the one teacher/one language model has been adopted and approximately half the day is spent in each language. The analysis of the data comprising semi-structured interviews, filmed observations, stimulated video recall and focus group sessions revealed a shift in teachers' language awareness concerning the use of students' L1 as resources and their willingness to experiment with new pedagogies drawing on students' entire linguistic repertoires. The data highlighted challenges which emerged during the implementation of more flexible multilingual pedagogies as well as teachers' need for learning and long-term continued professional development.