School: another brick outside the walls

Has confinement shaken the foundations of the educational institution? Temporarily removed from the walls of the school, teachers and families from working-class neighborhoods have sometimes succeeded in coming together to build new relationships. Far from the usual representations of each.

"We want to show that, in the face of a common difficulty - the pandemic - we can observe a marginal change in the types of relationships that characterize schools," explains Geneviève Zoïa, an anthropologist and member of Cepel*. During the lockdown, the researcher looked at relations between parents and teachers in working-class neighborhoods, notably in Clichy-sous-Bois and the Mas de Mingue district of Nîmes.

"Something has happened," asserts the anthropologist, who also draws on the fieldwork of two Masters students, Julie Gameros and Tiphaine Adeline-Rousseau. While it's too early to conclude that these changes will have a lasting impact on the educational landscape, certain characteristics of our educational system do seem to have been shaken by this crisis. Starting with the vertical nature of relations between the institution and families, often built around the problems of the child and the parents, who struggle to support them.

Breaking down representations

"During the period of confinement, teachers and parents were able to get outside the walls and work together on issues other than the child's difficulties. They were able to discover each other outside this very vertical framework where the school always dictates the rules, and to deconstruct the negative representations they had of each other", explains Geneviève Zoïa. In this way, distance learning has enabled some families to realize that teachers really do care about their children, and teachers have deconstructed the image of the parent as consumer, with little involvement in school support.

Another principle called into question by confinement is neutrality. A pillar of the French education system, along with secularism, neutrality implies, according to the researcher, "that the school must be the same for everyone, and that we therefore know nothing about each other's particularities". The introduction of virtual classrooms and regular telephone and e-mail exchanges between teachers and parents have opened a window onto the ordinary lives of both. They have often led to more personalized relationships, with greater consideration given to the specific circumstances of each pupil.

During this period, we've seen a realization of relationships," describes the researcher. E-mails are signed by first name, little brothers and sisters are seen passing by during the virtual classroom, news is asked on the phone when homework is given. Here again, the purely neutral relationship is deconstructed in favor of something more personal.

Open the classroom

Teaching methods have also had to adapt to these new constraints. A challenge for some teachers unfamiliar with the digital tools they had to learn "on the job". The results have been positive overall. "Many teachers say they want to adopt these new methods, which enable them to see their job in a different light, to personalize their teaching more, and to adapt better to their pupils," observes the anthropologist.

Virtual classrooms, blogging, What's app groups , teacher "tutorials" for parents - for Geneviève Zoïa, "teachers opened up their classrooms and showed what they were doing at school, and on the other hand, parents were surprised and grateful for the initiatives taken for their children." Some of the pupils have also shown themselves to be different in this new configuration, "more autonomous, more active because they are less exposed to the gaze of others in a virtual classroom than at school" .

Nevertheless, the anthropologist does not minimize the dropout rate, the difficulties of access to digital technology or the feeling of illegitimacy in the support of children that characterize the relationship between working-class families and the educational institution. "We know that working-class families are less familiar with school codes. Of course, the virus has had a magnifying glass effect on phenomena we already know about, but we also need to look at what this situation, which is de facto experimental, has enabled us to change.

Towards a new narrative

According to the researcher, this could be the way to change the negative narrative that schools have been telling about themselves for years. A narrative regularly fed by "the PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] surveys, which show us that French schools are discriminating, by the whole narrative around the perpetuation of inequalities, by all the difficulties in changing, in making reforms...".

On the contrary, Geneviève Zoïa's work reveals that in particularly trying circumstances, teachers and families have often been "able to adapt, to meet each other, to overcome the very strong feeling in the neighborhoods that confines school to the opposition 'them' and 'us'. It's a good feeling! It's an observation that, far from breaking down the school, adds a new brick to its construction.

*Center d'études politiques et sociales: environnement, santé, territoires (UM - CNRS)