Unit 4 - Theorising the links with school practices

Aline FREY is a lecturer at the INSPE of Aix-Marseille where she teaches the psychology of learning in the MEEF (teacher training) master program. She is also a researcher at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (LNC), in the “Music, Language, Writing” team. She works on the transfer of learning between music (and singing) and other cognitive and language skills.

Vincent LIQUETE is full professor at the INSPE of the academy of Bordeaux where he teaches information and communication sciences. He is also in charge of research, innovation, and international development. He is co-director of the MICA research Unit (UR 4426) at Bordeaux Montaigne University. His main research focus is information practices, information cultures and re-documentarisation activities in learning situations.

• MICA link : https://mica.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/liquete-vincent/
• portrait : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Liqu%C3%A8te

• https://lnc.univ-amu.fr/fr/profile/frey-aline

Unit 4 of MTN Education “Theorizing the links with school practices” brings together about 90 researchers and teacher-researchers from various disciplines who focus on theorizing and improving the link between educational research and the plurality of school, training and, more broadly, learning fields.

The first working sessions of Unit 4 mainly focused on the question of improving the training of (future) teachers through research. The question of the link between research and training is not new. It is admittedly difficult to implement and consolidate. For student-teachers, it is still too often reduced to a few hours of teaching even as they have to focus on writing a master’s thesis for the end of the year. However, the question of training “in/through” research also aims to help students acquire a real scientific culture and expertise in order to understand the difficulties arising from the professional field.

We note that many professional sectors are asking themselves the same type of questions; for example, those of the mediation professions, the health professions (IFSI) or social educators, as well as the teaching professions. For the latter, the latest reform, entitled “For a School of Confidence” explicitly raises the question of the research-training link and monitoring thereof, which has become a priority for training actors and researchers. But there are many other ways and types of offers available to us: requests for support from professionals in the field, dysfunctional situations observed in the field that trigger a call for help from researchers, emerging dynamics around social innovation, calls for scientific popularization events, and last but not least, emergency situations (health, social, etc.). One of the underlying purposes is to foster and nurture scientific culture and approaches among professionals, by trying to accompany them to get out of their routines and their (un)certainties, while injecting a dose of doubt in order to accept the scientific readings and analyses.

Lastly, the question of the constant updating of knowledge and methods is at the heart of professionalization. Indeed, how can we, alone and/or as a team, disseminate, read, and compare what scientists tell us about a question and what professionals practice day in, day out? Behind this is also looms the question of the reliability of sources and scientific knowledge of reference, in support of a reflective professional practice.

To initiate discussion and dialogue, two half-day sessions on the theme of teacher training through research were organized. In 2021, this theme was discussed during two meetings organized on April 7 and June 22. These meetings featured six presentations by members of the Unit who volunteered to present field research mechanisms related to the training of teachers and their involvement in research. The research topics presented showed the multidisciplinary and varied nature of the approaches.

In the future, the members of this Unit would like to co-elaborate research dynamics and cross-perspectives, in order to densify our network of researchers and actors in education and training.

This was followed by discussions between communities of researchers on our respective experiences in the field of setting up, piloting and scientific orientation of projects; thus, programs (PIA) such as PEGASE in Grenoble, AMPIRIC in Marseilles… were detailed, together with their projects and researchers’ stories.

By and large, 4 directions are emerging for the coming months within Unit 4 :

a- To progressively build a common general bibliographic base between the members of the Unit
b- To devise projects on the basis of the first demonstrators (PEGASE, AMPIRIC,…)
c- To compare the disciplinary epistemologies and methods that we respectively call upon within Unit 4
d- To open and consolidate partnerships in France and abroad.