Publications

Teaching to emancipate, emancipating to learn
« Enseigner pour émanciper, émanciper pour apprendre »

Jacques Cornet and Noëlle De Smet

Editions ESF (Edition Sociale Française) – Collection Pédagogies

Issy-Les-Moulineaux (France) – March 2013

Book

French

English

Identification of students’ at risk

In this book, the authors propose another conception of the class group. Their references are Freinet, Bonnéry (through the works of the interdisciplinary team Escol – “Education, Scolarisation”), but also the institutional pedagogy (evoked in the review of publication “Did you say institutional pedagogy?”).
This concept is explained in six chapters:
• To get rid of one’s positions and illusions
• To prompt the will to learn
• To raise students to their dignity
• To make sense
• To create authority
• To build knowledge
For the authors, the school must propose an acculturating collective lest only those with the school culture heritage will succeed.
They claim they have written this book so that it can help trainers. But they also want it to be useful to teachers who will want to read it.
Each chapter proposes a problem. Readers can imagine themselves in a situation and try the different solutions as if they were in training. The authors try never to have THE right answer but to fuel an analysis of the readers’ situations and references.
The cases are always concrete, critical, drawn from experiences. The authors are convinced that it is the right way to train oneself.

According to Philippe Mérieu, a specialist in educational and pedagogical sciences, who prefaced the book:
“With exemplary coherence, the authors give us a true “manual” of pedagogy for a genuinely emancipating education. They precisely explain what “emancipating” means and it is possible, in a classroom, to work in a cooperative way so that each student can learn, sets themselves free of any form of fatality and build themselves a “free subject”.
Each topic of the book is introduced with a practical situation, described and analysed with precisions. The reader is thus immersed in the school, in front of “real” students, confronted to decisive choices that teachers must made in order to go beyond the conflict, find a way to mobilise their students on complex knowledge, organise efficient learning activities… From there are mobilised data from university research as well as from educationalists’ propositions. In this way, the reader builds, in their journey with authors, real new professional knowledge.
This book thus becomes an individual and collective training tool, for initial and continuing training. A tool to help teachers emancipate through their common work and contributing, more and more, better and better, to their students’ emancipation.”

It must be noted that J. Cornet and N. De Smet are members of “CGé” (Changement pour l’Egalité), a socio-pedagogical movement that aims to improve the quality of education and training in the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, with a prospect of equality and democracy. This association has already been presented by Inforef in the project “[email protected]”.

Website publisher ESF:
http://www.esf-editeur.fr/index.php?content=produit&texte=Cornet+et+De+Smet&search_general=0
Website CGé:
http://www.changement-egalite.be/spip.php?article2599#.UrAeh3Qimu8

Julien Keutgen

Inforef

Translator – project assistant