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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Citizenship Education at the Republican Schools in France: Comprehensive Review and Teachers' Points of View

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description

Citizenship Education at the Republican Schools in France: Comprehensive Review and Teachers' Points of View This thesis deals with citizenship education in France, a subject that has been on the agenda for some thirty years and the object of intense debates, especially in a national community deeply shocked by recent terrorist attacks. As there are but few studies on the subject, especially from an empirical perspective (Bozec, 2016), our objective is a comprehensive review of citizenship education in France. We explore how the subject is conceived officially and integrates national curricula as well as how it is implemented at school. In fact, we seek to answer the question: how is citizenship education taught in French schools? In order to do that, we compare the official prescriptions to the actual practices of the teachers, taking into consideration the work ergonomics approach, which tries to explain the differences between official recommendations and actual practices (Amigues, 2002, 2009).We have adopted a mixed method, both qualitative and quantitative (e.g. Larivière & Corbière, 2014) and focused on the analysis of official texts, the conduct and exploitation of free and semi-structured interviews and the questionnaire survey of almost 107 elementary school teachers. The main study of this thesis shows that there is often a gap between the official orientations of the Ministry of Education and the teachers‘ actual practices. In most cases, the teachers‘ response to the official recommendations is mediocre, both in the schools and in their classes. The results of the study indicate that the socio-professional characteristics of the teachers and the contextual characteristics of the schools affect the practical implementation of the official prescriptions in citizenship education. This research also enabled us to test a theoretical model we developed about the determinants of citizenship practices in the classroom. According to this model, the quality of life in school has direct and indirect effects on the citizenship practices of teachers in their classes, depending on the difficulties they encounter in the classroom.