In this section, we set out the working principles applied to the “Freinet” school in Mons-en-Barœul, firstly to understand the teaching methodology introduced, and secondly, to serve as a reference framework for interpreting the results observed, and to provide us with tools to explore the question of transferability.
2-1-1 – The school as an institution
This subtitle suggests that nothing should be taken as given; everything needs to be thought through, developed and institutionalized, both by teachers and with respect to their working methods.
1° The school focuses on learning : this principle is obviously fundamental and is continually reaffirmed. It is the justification behind everything else, the systems in place and the rules, even the different types of punishment: most things are forbidden because they are considered to affect learning or to hinder work. Learning processes – and not the child – are therefore at the heart of the present system. School is there for learning and this is only achieved through hard work. Teachers and pupils alike frequently use a number of terms in their vocabulary like work and career(s). The learning processes concern and are indissociable from knowledge, know-how and behavioural skills. From this perspective, instruction and education serve one another and are therefore fundamental objectives.
2° The school as a community was established, and is constantly being re-established, via diverse provisions, including, in particular:
– an institutional project – incorporated, in its entirety, at the very heart of a school as a model of “Freinet” pedagogy – articulated in line with a working and experimentation agreement with the academic inspectorates and a research agreement with a research team;
– a real teaching project, assessed and re-designed collectively, which provided a charter and served to guarantee the work undertaken;
- the co-opting, within the Freinet movement, of founding members and replacements for those who leave;
– many frequent and genuinely functional meetings with the class, the school, the teaching staff, etc.
3° The school is formed as a relatively autonomous micro-society. This is confirmed in particular by the fact that it draws up of its own rules and regulations, by the creation of specific decision-making authorities, by its work-centred and professional culture, by the development of a common culture and by highly structured leisure activities (recreation, fêtes, evening workshops taught partly by the teachers or parents, and which are, consequently, considered as part of the learning project and are not simply as leisure activities set apart from work and group rules. Consequently, its members (both teachers and pupils) are all considered as school citizens. In addition, sociability and citizenship are central principles in that they are constantly set out as aims, objectives and conditions for learning. They are therefore principles to live by and of life and are not one-off discursive objects, only mentioned when calling someone to order or during lessons on civility.
4° This micro-society is linked to a democratic ideal, put to the test every day, whatever the difficulties. It is not a question of laying down or imposing an ideal in words alone for some remote future, but of trying to put it into practice within a school, as a common good. To this end, numerous principles have been initiatives are designed to support this project:
– the student-citizens are seen as equals in terms of rights and obligations (with control mechanisms such as the institutional rotation of tasks and responsibilities, different meetings, etc.);
– no individual pupil’s fate is set in stone: rights can be lost and regained;
–rules are drawn up collectively in class and school meetings, and they are then voted for and tested before being adopted or integrated in the social order (via numerous notices in the school and in the classrooms) so that nobody can plead ignorance. They may subsequently be altered;
– everyone, teachers and students alike, is subject to the rules which is a key to mutual respect and the pupils’ belief in the value of rules and regulations;
–cooperation and mutual help – and not competition – are the main working principles via group work, shared equipment, teacher encouragement, a notice board for messages asking for help, absence of stigmatization in the event of difficulties and mistakes, etc.;
– problems are discussed collectively and rapidly in places and at times set aside for this purpose, thereby avoiding a number of pitfalls: their concealment, summary management by a single teacher or by the pupils themselves, gut reactions without reference to the rules, and their persistence in the same form.
5° There is a desire to construct a common heritage of this society, with raised awareness through the recording and the conservation of experiences, talks, writing, drawings, sculptures, etc., also using numerous resources (class logbooks, posters, archives…). This culture, which is able to forge identities (school, class…), adopts multiple functions: it acts as a basis for work, enabling different activities to be linked together, for evidence of a collective and individual history, an assumed heritage, a source for monitoring learning progress… It also provides a specific response to the tensions between the school culture and out-of-school cultures (filtered and reconstructed for learning purposes), mediation towards forms considered as more legitimate, and an alternative tool in view of the prerequisites often called for.
6° Nonetheless, this micro-society is not at all insular. It is, on the contrary, largely open to the outside world. Thus, the knowledge and know-how taught is constantly presented in relation to its functionality in the non school world, and the curiosity of pupils is continually stimulated. Each class has pen friend relationships, resulting in a great deal of writing activity. The group of teachers goes out of its way to meet families and tries to interest them in joining schoolwork support activities (as parents of pupils and not just of children) : they are invited into the school during school fêtes or presentations of the pupils’ work and on Saturday mornings; kept regularly informed via home/school notebooks, and frequent and explicit posters at the school entrance; called in to meet teachers, even when there are no problems; invited for conferences or to help out during evening workshops … In addition, initiatives like free writing activities, interviews and the “what’s new” sessions in the morning, provide opportunities for sharing experiences, subjects, knowledge, experience, etc. between school and the family, but always in a highly codified way with a specific learning purpose …
7° The methods described call for at least three remarks. The first concerns the authority and power of the teachers, necessary to uphold the school’s underlying principles and their implementation, but at the same time taking into account the fact
that this authority and power is itself subject to regulations and internal controls (school rules and guidelines) and external controls (the teaching body, the principles of the Freinet movement, etc.). This always leads to certain tensions and a delicate balance needs to be found between the construction of democracy and the teacher’s power (since, for example, at times, teachers step back from the rules that they themselves are normally bound by, in order to ensure their application …). The second remark concerns an interrogation regarding the dominant school processes. For pupils in this system, the loss of rights via the loss of autonomy, means finding themselves back in a traditional school system. The third remark aims to emphasise the original way that the tensions between the school culture and out-of-school cultures are resolved via the construction of a specific class culture, a culture of compromise that is continually redesigned in line with transition.
2-1-2 – Pupils and learning
Learning is absolutely central. In consequence, everything is organised around achieving this goal, based on a few founding principles.
1° Fundamentally, every child is considered as wanting to and capable of learning as long as the educational environment allows them to and facilitates their learning. To some extent, this is an axiom which, admittedly, in a way constructs a child’s nature, but which subsequently places an inescapable burden of responsibility on teachers. On this basis, all failure by pupils is seen as a failure of the teaching environment or, at least, as strongly calling into question the teachers’ work. This again helps us to understand the constant questioning of teaching methods as well as the individual need for self-training and co-training of teachers. The dynamics and perpetual motion are characteristic of the way they work.
2° The principle mentioned is nonetheless accompanied by a second principle which counterbalances its possible idealism. Accordingly, the child must be considered as a learning subject (school or teaching subject), a member of a community with specific rules and ways of working. A number of initiatives can be understood, at least in part, within this perspective, like being responsible for developing and maintaining adhesion and enrolment: providing advice, drawing up rules, jobs, work given in line with materials and questions provided by the pupils…
It should be noted that the teachers do this with extreme care, so as not to give the pupils the impression that they have to break away from their home environment. Everything is done to ensure that schooling is not considered as a renunciation…
We would also like to underline the fact that this occurs, in many cases, by recognising the roles held by the children outside the school environment (and their responsibilities, which are often considerable in working class families), or even by re-establishing the status of some pupils as children, helping them to shake off the external burden of “big people” or adults, which is often very difficult for them to manage. Thus, paradoxically, the constitution of the out-of-school subject into a pupil sometimes takes place through rebuilding, at least temporarily, their identity as a child…
3° It is the pupils themselves who must learn, and no one else in their place, which has undoubtedly become commonplace in much discourse about school. What is striking here, however, is the genuine incorporation of this principle in the practices put in place. It gives rise to two rational principles:
- depending on the diversity of pupils, their different rhythms and ways of acquiring knowledge and know-how, the teachers are particularly careful to provide tailored forms of construction for each pupil and their specific temporality (cf. learning to read, research, creation, certificates, work plans…);
- secondly, the central role of the teacher is not designed uniquely according to the dominant learning transmission method but mainly as the conception, the implementation and the support for initiatives and situations that facilitate pupils’ learning.
4° While it is the pupils who learn, they only learn from questions they have that motivate them and give meaning to the knowledge and know-how. This means that teachers should not give cut-and-dried answers to questions that haven’t even been asked but should elicit questions, building on the thirst for knowledge and understanding that is ostensibly shared by all children, and on approaches designed to awaken, stimulate, fuel and increase this desire. Thus, starting out with the “what’s new” sessions or interviews, pupils can get involved in research or preparation for conferences which will be taken up again in other frameworks through phases of socialisation via the feedback and questions from teachers and / or peers.
This principle nonetheless has to be put squared with two types of practice. The first consists of managing pupils’ questions, which are not always dealt with immediately.
This is probably partly due to the teacher’s management of the chronogenesis of knowledge and the relationships between individuals and class groups. The second type of practice consists of the work children are given to do, and which may have no immediate relation to the questions they have as individuals (cf. work sheets), which could be due to a need to maintain a common reference framework for the programmes, to incorporate other structuring processes / or as a form of acculturation to the school structure, that goes beyond teaching per se.
5° “Pupils learn by doing” is the most often cited principle in the theoretical literature on alternative pedagogies. However, this needs to be viewed with respect to certain precisions, particularly regarding its articulation with complementary principles.
At any rate, it means that pupils learn by doing and because they experience work, projects, research… in this sense, and unlike other teaching methods or some other education theories, doing at school must be authentic and not involve pretend doing or a travesty of doing. Learning is the pupils’ main work and this is constantly repeated by the teachers. There is no question, therefore, of pretending to learn by or through “real life situations” but rather of developing real projects, research, correspondence… to learn and because it helps develop the learning process.
6° However, this experiential learning articulates very closely with the construction of a distanced, reflexive position, through numerous and commonly used mechanisms: – situations of preparing to act (including, for example, plans or drawings);
– discussions in groups, pairs or with the teacher, about problems, strategies and possible solutions;
–cooperation (cf. the many support measures or requests for help as well as forms of group dictation);
– the relationship between reflection and action constantly called on by the teacher during the class work;
–no stigmatisation when mistakes are made;
– the time allowed, which is rarely restrictive and which may be extended to a shared and satisfactory outcome;
– the multiplicity of socialisation and assessment situations …
It is also important to highlight the two pillars of learning, doing and the reflexive distance to doing that have rarely been mentioned about the Freinet pedagogy.
7° Pupils also learn through adopting numerous roles and positions in relation to knowledge and know-how: as pupil, user, creator, researcher, teacher, conference speaker, auditor, member of a discussion, critic, assistant… From this perspective, they are protean agents with respect to roles and activities that are far more diverse, continually and over the long term, than those of pupils subjected to more traditional teaching methods. These roles and positions, introduced at an early stage (from nursery school to the first year of primary school), can be seen as an updating of multiple ways of doing and the distance to doing, via concrete situations. Complementary, they introduce a concept that facilitates learning via the variety of relationships established with knowledge and the various forms of input used. Looking at it another way, we could consider that this principle refers at least implicitly to ‘institutional’ approaches of academic communities and the way they construct knowledge and pedagogical- didactic concepts within which the development of an ‘academic school community’ and the introduction of a multiplicity of roles are fundamental.
8° Pupils learn by experimenting with different forms of thinking. This means that different forms of thinking, particularly convergent and divergent thinking, are constantly demanded in numerous subjects, calling into question certain traditional school activities such as the domination of exercises that require convergence and disciplinary compartmentalization.
This framework includes the great importance given to creativity, for example, (including in mathematics) and the promotion of the arts. We may also note that certain divisions opposing the disciplines are called into question via research or mathematical creations, or else critical discussions, and planning and reflection in the field of the arts. This framework also includes the fundamental place of the production of hypotheses and experimentation and the continual management of the duality between rigour and freedom and, strikingly, unlike dominant educational methods elsewhere, emphasis is systematically placed on the idea that in general, there are many solutions to a problem and different ways of achieving the same goal…
9° Pupils learn because they feel safe. This principle is extremely important, especially in an environment where the living conditions and the relationships with school are often difficult. Again, it operates in many ways. It involves, for example, avoiding cutting off with their out-of-school life, at the same time allowing the pupils to shed their out-of-school worries, at least in part, and to truly express themselves. Various
methods exist with this in mind, i.e. “what’s new?”, free writing sessions, advice, creation…) which structure this material in educational forms that can be managed and articulated with learning. Again, it involves developing and guaranteeing a safe school environment, which avoids, as much as it is able, all forms of violence or fears likely to disrupt the work, at the same time giving the children the right to express their needs as children (drinking in the classroom, moving about, etc.).
Last, and above all, it involves making the learning situations safe, via:
– the right to make mistakes (no stigmatisation and, on the contrary, considering mistakes as objects of work and reflection, and as legitimate and interesting…);
– a more formative assessment role: no marks or ranking, but certificates, exhibitions of progress, removal of stress (like in dictation, the most important thing is to do their best…) ;
–systematic help from peers and teachers, whether cognitive or material (store of stationary in case someone forgets something, accessible markings on all the objects available in the classes, plans and guides to help them use the computers themselves…). In keeping with the cooperation principle, this assistance is legitimate, official and never stigmatising;
– frameworks that can be adopted by everyone: public posting of the day‘s work organisation, individual plans, daily routines …
– stages repeated so as to constantly relate them to what is being done or what has been done with what was worked on before;
–time, adjusted to everyone’ needs, for discussions and search for possible solutions … It is probably because the teaching framework is so safe that the unexpected may be incorporated without the rest falling apart, and the pupils can learn by being encouraged to take risks without fear of a return to punishment, quickly getting involved in research, presentations and creative output…
10° The last principle, which I will just mention briefly, seems to me to rarely receive much attention in schools. It is that pupils learn because they can position themselves in a history of their learning which is made accessible to them through procedures or measures such as work plans and certificates, stages in their projects, keeping as many of their documents as possible, the class logbook, getting in touch with pupils from