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International audience

In the latest educational policies at national and European level, lifelong guidance is increasingly identified as a key instrument to innovate and strengthen the provision of schooling to reduce school dropout and develop students’ adaptive capacities in a context of growing job flexibility. Guidance activities constitute indeed a key setting for the development of Career Management Skills (CMS), those abilities needed to support students in their transitions through education, work and training. By looking at the Italian context, our paper outlines how lifelong guidance policies, and the technological mediation used to make them operational, constitute crucial devices promoting changings in teachers’ professional culture. In particular, we analyse how teachers are recruited into a new pedagogical paradigm and we reflect on if and how this opens or closes spaces for developing processes of empowering or domination, especially for students from an underprivileged background. In the paper, we discuss the case of the recent introduction of a career guidance software in Italian schools, named SORPRENDO, whose aim is to improve the quality of guidance services in Italy and provide an e-learning platform where teachers can support and evaluate the future planning of students. First, we provide a theoretical reflection on the agential effect of digital devices in the governing of education, in particular through their interaction with teachers’ practices; secondly, through an empiric case study research, we show the types of educational practices the software makes ‘affordable’ within the Italian school context, and the organisational and cultural tensions it creates. We conclude by reflecting on the impact of the lifelong guidance project on the pedagogical relationship between teachers and their students, highlighting limits and opportunities.

International audience

International audience; Transformations were introduced in France in order to better balance relationships between the professionals in education and its end users. It was meant to allow the right to inspect the school institution as well as to offer wider decision making powers regarding the schooling of children. For example, parents can contest suggestions for repeating a school year. To do so, they may call upon an 'arbitrator' from the Ministry of Education if and when they disagree with school practices. In a broader sense, they have to formulate the request themselves and ask for the child's integration into a 'special' unit to pupils with learning difficulties. A series of measures was therefore combined into the legislative process governing the duty of the school institution towards its users and strengthening the rights of the latter, which is quite similar to a political will of empowerment of the individuals to cope with the school as an institution. These transformations bring us back to the context of the so called policies of New public management. They emphasize the rights of the users, the performance(s) of the system and its efficiency, as well as point out the necessity of "being accountable". But in the French context, and it is precisely what we are going to demonstrate here, the changes have been translated into increased constraints for teachers, who are de facto dispossessed of their professional autonomy. Yet the teachers are not necessarily better equipped to support their pupils. This situation causes inherent contradictions. We suggest we should explore these in our paper based on a quantitative and qualitative methodology aiming at measuring and understanding teachers' attrition in the French context. According to an empirical design begun in 2015, first results demonstrate that teachers need personal and professional resources to face disturbing educative situations, and that the probability of leaving the teaching profession is intrinsically linked with those resources about the the blues of the working teacher in the workplace today.

International audience