L’expérimentation d’une formation conjointe d’enseignement université institutionnelle – université populaire : la « géographie sociale » à Saint-Denis

At the beginning of the 2015-2016 academic year a new education program was launched, run as a joint project between the Department of Geography at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (Paris 8) and the People’s University of Saint-Denis, known as the “Dionyversité”. This hybrid form of education has been seen as an opportunity to create, within the context of institutional education, a non-authoritarian educational approach that places fostering students’ appetite for learning above the obligation to complete work. This article details the implementation of this program, its positive aspects as well as its limitations. It raises questions rather providing answers (about evaluation, student-teacher relations, roles and expectations of both educators and students, authority, violence within a university context, etc.), while leaving scope for imagining pedagogical innovations that can respond to them, and reflecting upon the specific role that geography as a subject area plays in this kind of education experiment.