Abstract
Group dynamics in the classroom are a fundamental aspect of learning which, it is argued here, has not received sufficient academic interest. Increasingly, however, research on critical and alternative pedagogy is concerned with exploring the benefits of collaborative learning. This paper recalls the insights of two streams of French institutional pedagogy from the 1960s: the clinical and political dimensions of learning, and the benefits of group-based approaches in education. These pedagogies, based on structural analysis of relationships in the classroom, explore first how teachers’ and learners’ hierarchical relationships to knowledge impede exchange and communication in traditional pedagogies; and, second, how the teacher’s traditional stance in the classroom tends to reinforce psychological stress in learners by placing the teacher as a new parental figure. Both pedagogies introduce mediations or techniques inspired by Freinet, such as the learners’ council, which disrupt hierarchies in the classroom. These mediations enable learners to overcome their mental and affective blocks and become active agents of their individual and collective learning processes.
Introduction
Critical educational research can be roughly delineated according to two major trends. The first, sociological, considers the metamorphosis of education as social reproduction and the shaping of neoliberal subjectivities; the second, pedagogical, explores how to render the teacher–learner relationship more equal. The group dimension of classrooms remains in the background of these approaches, although this has recently become a growing field of interest. This paper draws on two streams of French institutional pedagogy from the 1960s to emphasise that a classroom is a group, that group dynamics affect learning experiences, and that facilitating multiple types of interaction among group members, making the classroom a vivid community, could be beneficial for learning. These pedagogies developed simultaneously in France, shared Freinet’s heritage and encouraged pupils to turn a critical eye on the society in which they lived. However, as this paper outlines, their means towards achieving this shared goal have differed. In order to provide clarity of the argument, we will distinguish ‘institutional pedagogy’ from ‘self-governance pedagogy’, although all those who supported them claimed the label of ‘institutional pedagogy’. We use the plural ‘institutional pedagogies’ to include both ‘streams’ simultaneously.
Institutional pedagogues participated in an atmosphere of strong, activist criticism of schooling. Embodying Trotskyist, entryist (or ‘insider’) stances and influenced by Felix Guattari, they sought to change public (state) schools from inside and embraced the critical potential of pupils talking collectively. In our view, the most interesting aspect of these pedagogies is the critical insights they bring to the classroom by taking advantage of the group dimension of classroom learning, building upon the effects groups unleash or mitigate, and by introducing collective decision-making in learning activities. In an attempt to familiarize our readers with the challenges tackled by these little-known institutional pedagogies, we have chosen to review current investigations exploring similar group dynamics, although these current investigations do not relate strictly to the field of ‘critical pedagogy’. We also believe that insights derived from French institutional pedagogies – notably, half a century ago – could enrich the growing debate raised by these contemporary innovative methods, namely Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLE) and the ‘transformability’ approach.
Mitra and Rana (2001) claimed that the benefits of SOLE emerged from observations in slums in India. Computers were installed in a suburban wall and Mitra observed that unschooled children, aged 8–13, had taught themselves basic computer literacy, and later biology, through self-organisation. Mitra insisted that his team willingly withdrew from any directive or ‘invasive’ participation (apart from presenting computers as ‘funny tools’), and did not intervene in any of the children’s learning activities. He and his colleagues observed in particular that children would find knowledgeable peers in the neighbourhood when needed, but that most of the learning took place through individual and collective attempts and observation of the unknown machine called ‘computer’. Furthermore, they also observed that any discovery made by a child would be repeated by others, and that the changes occurring during this repetitive process led to further learning. The team was interested to discover that, contrary to commonly-held expectations, children did not need teachers to learn – as long as they had a computer. 1 In the second experiment children were offered a computer with biology material in English, a language of which they did not have detailed knowledge. Two months after this ‘self-organised learning’ these children had acquired a mastery of the subject similar to that of their neighbouring schooled peers. Two months thereafter, with the encouragement of an ‘ignorant’, unschooled young woman acting as interlocutor, they achieved the same level of proficiency as children taught in an elite school in Delhi. Once again, the team was somewhat confused by these (unexpected) results of self-organised, collective learning.
The SOLE approach was furthered through experiments in British schools where children were asked challenging questions (e.g. ‘When did history start?’), distributed in groups of three to four learners, and offered 30–90 minutes of computer-based investigation of the topic (Dolan et al., 2013). Another development is the ‘Schools in the Cloud’ project, where groups of children are matched and connected, via Skype, with a ‘Granny’ who serves as an encouraging interlocutor (Mitra et al., 2016). The approach by Mitra et al. has been paralleled with Rancière’s ‘Ignorant Schoolmaster’ principles (Stamp, 2013); it is worth noting, however, that SOLE does not overtly conform to the so-called ‘Critical Pedagogy’. Mitra himself has acknowledged that his approach, although progressive in origin, could be adapted to current neoliberal agendas (Dolan et al., 2013).
With regard to the transformability approach, Hart et al. (2004), in their work Learning without Limit, investigated how teachers working in the British state educational sector departed from the official ‘fixed-ability’ approach and implemented instead the ‘transformability’ paradigm. Based on classroom observations and discussions with teachers, the research concluded that: The core idea of transformability contrasts with the underlying fatalism associated with ability labels. It means that things always have the potential to change, and that people have the power to change things for the better by what they do in the present. Classroom conditions can change, and be changed, to enrich and enhance learning opportunities and free learning from some existing constraints. All young people can become better learners, if the subjective conditions needed to support and empower their learning are developed and consolidated through everyday experiences in the classroom. (Hart et al., 2004: 192)
Against this backdrop, French institutional pedagogies from the 1960s provide useful insights on how learning can be facilitated when modifying its subjective, collective and material conditions. 2 These reflections could enrich current perspectives on ‘collective’ and ‘self-organised’ learning. As with SOLE and the transformability approach, institutional pedagogies place greater emphasis on group dynamics among children than the traditional, dual teacher–learner relationship (as opposed to learners, plural: the group). Unlike these recent approaches, however, institutional pedagogies emerged from radical political stances or ‘critical Marxism’, which tracked the alienating character of schools in parallel with that of other ‘bureaucratised’ environments: companies, hospitals and prisons. We will now consider and compare the two ‘streams’ of institutional pedagogies: Fernand Oury’s and Aida Vasquez’s ‘institutional pedagogy’ – using the singular to refer to their practice (Oury and Vasquez, 1967) – informed by psychoanalytical structuralism; and the ‘self-governance pedagogy’ of Georges Lapassade and René Lourau influenced primarily by social psychology and group dynamics (Lourau, 1971).
Classroom experience: structural approaches
Initially, ‘institutional pedagogies’ sought to adapt Freinet’s techniques to the specificities of urban schools. Institutional pedagogy and ‘self-governance’ pedagogy share the concern that the French schooling system in the 1960s impaired learning and had detrimental effects on children’s subjectivities. By focusing on a group of learners they question two central dimensions of schooling. First, in a classroom the ‘subject’ is always collective, and this ‘collective subject’ forms subjects for further collective life. Education therefore has a political dimension. Second, it is important to consider classrooms beyond the ‘dual’ relationship between the teacher and ‘the’ learner, and identify or diagnose the multiple affiliations that disrupt subjects and shape their behaviour. In line with Deleuze’s use of the term (1998), we call this second dimension ‘clinical’.
Towards the concept of mediation: the Council
Because Freinet had introduced the press and the ‘journal’ to the classroom (Freinet, 1964), both institutional pedagogies make use of techniques in the classroom as educational mediations whose effects on group and individuals are more beneficial than the traditional directive role of the teacher. A central mediation for both institutional pedagogies is the class assembly or Council. These pedagogies reinforce the role of the class assembly/Council and broaden the scope of its tasks, similar to Freinet’s practice, but in a slightly different way. Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez imposed the functioning of the Council on children: it is a weekly collective meeting where the group discusses leisure activities and plans, texts for the classroom journal or objects for display, as well as conflicts among children, organisational issues in the classroom, etc. Regarding the classroom journal, children propose material, whether texts or illustrations, and they decide, in the Council, what will be published. The teacher does not chair the Council (various children take that position during the school year), but does retain the possibility of vetoing any decision, and expresses their view on the topics after the children have chosen them.
In self-governance pedagogy, the teacher does not impose the Council; rather, it generally emerges from the group of learners after the teacher has stepped back and suggested or strongly advised them to get organised collectively and to decide on learning activities. That is, at the beginning of the school year, self-governance teachers declare that they will only function as a ‘resource’ for learners, who will familiarise themselves with the curriculum and organise learning collectively. After initial astonishment, the group’s first task becomes finding ways to make collective decisions – and, most commonly, a Council is created (see also Wustefeld, 2016). The function of the Council is broader than in institutional pedagogy, because it is the platform where learning assignments and activities are specified, in addition to conflict resolution, design of extra-curricular activities, etc. For example, one self-governance pedagogue has observed his pupils organising the purchase and installation of an old car in their (suitably-large) classroom as a tool for learning about mechanics; and, during the experience, they also learned what a budget is and how to manage it, about the economic value of cars, and how to negotiate with the head-teacher. Both practices reinforce the importance of the group and, we could say, use the group as new technique, a new mediation to facilitate education.
Mediations in classroom: a clinical approach
The concept of mediation is key to institutional pedagogies and echoes the influence of structuralism on their approaches – whether Marxist or psychoanalytical structuralism. In institutional pedagogy the teacher is responsible for introducing new ‘mediations’ (to the child or in the classroom) when a child faces psychological blocks in their subjective development. Quoting the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jean Oury, Fernand Oury (his brother) and Aïda Vasquez explained that, The aim of … institutional pedagogy is to create systems of mediations. The press is mediation; the cooperative is mediation… that bring individuals into play about [something]. One can just retain these words ‘bringing-into-play-about’; if one carefully observes what happens, this bringing into play is the more or less automatic adjustment of imaginary identifications (of the children present around the table, each having his or her role) to differentiate (children) according to a law. One notices that these identifications relate to roles played in structures that are instituted by the group (e.g. the press). These structures actually support, at the end of the day, all this process/work [‘travail’] of identification reorganisation. When this play/game works, each subject finds himself. The image of himself that he finds in the other, who he faces printing, is no longer an opportunity of rivalry, of seduction, etc. but the support of ‘what one must go through to’ access a certain order. This order is instituted by the general ‘law’ of the classroom, whose technical rule (you must print this way, someone must control, etc.) is almost contingent. (Oury and Vasquez, 1967: 188) Here could lay the teacher’s specific role: instead of becoming subject of parental replacement for children who have been rejected individually in a neurotic situation, [the teacher] allows the classroom to become something else than this institution that subjugates children; to become a form of collective subject whose institutions enable reinterpreting what will occur in its inside. (Oury and Vasquez, 1967: 126)
Mediation: a political approach
Self-governance pedagogy is also preoccupied with structural relationships in the classroom. The ‘self’ included in the name of the pedagogy refers simultaneously to individual ‘selfs’ comprising the classroom, and to the collective ‘self’ that the group constitutes. The name of the pedagogy thus indicates the interconnection between individual and collective autonomy. As in institutional pedagogy, the concern for structural relationships is addressed through the Council. However, Lourau was interested in the structural relationships teacher and learners have with knowledge and discourse. On the one hand Lourau analysed relationships with knowledge:
The master’s knowledge is deemed complete, or at least identical to the finality of the institution (exam): the learner’s is always incomplete; The master can take distance, even criticizing or negating his/her knowledge: the learner must adhere to and identify themself institutionally with knowledge; and The master controls and appraises learner’s knowledge: the opposite is never true. (Lourau, 1966: 69)And, on the other hand, in relationships with speech. The master’s speech is focused on the message (it means something), hence its magical aspect. The learner’s speech is focused on the code (he or she must understand), hence its empirical character. The first one encodes, the second decodes. Their authority-value is distributed once and for all: the master is always a bit correct, the learner is always a bit wrong. Their ‘dialogue’ is standardised: the master, master of speech, gives and takes it. The learner must ask for it, or accept it. (Lourau, 1966: 69–70)
According to Lourau, these relationships obliterate reciprocity between teacher and learners. Their hierarchical organisation with regard to knowledge and speech makes it impossible for the teacher and learners to swap (structural) positions, and it also impedes any communication or exchange between them.
Self-governance pedagogy tackles this problem by allowing children collectively to organise learning time, space and activities in the classroom and create their own mediations. Given these responsibilities, children need first to find ways of making collective decisions. This is how a Council emerges, and children decide on its modus operandi: how speech is shared, what role is given to the teacher, how the chairperson (if any) is chosen. Once established, the first task of the Council is to become familiar with the official curriculum, and design learning activities – activities that would match both learners’ interest and curricular requirements. In the process, the curriculum itself can be challenged or surpassed. This design process also confronts the teacher with the limits of his or her knowledge, in front of children. Learners become able to ‘appraise’ teacher’s knowledge and, while approaching it, extend beyond the curriculum. In a nutshell, this ‘internal institution’ (internal to the classroom) places ‘reciprocity’ at the centre of teacher–learners relationship.
The structural dimension of classroom relationships reveals two problematic aspects of group dynamics and teaching approaches which remained implicit in SOLE and the transformability approach. First, Oury and Vasquez’s institutional pedagogy shows that emotions and psychological blocks at stake in education echo and influence deeper identification processes, going far beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge. Hence, they convey a clinical dimension to their structural approach of education. Second, self-governance pedagogy highlights the divisive, and hierarchizing, understanding of knowledge itself. Thus Lourau insists on the political dimension of structural relationships in the classroom. These two dimensions are fundamental with regard to one another, and seem always present in classroom. However, are they compatible? The two streams of institutional pedagogy argued against each other back in their time, and suggested that tackling one dimension was exclusive of the other. Let us take a closer look at this disagreement.
‘Transversality’ between clinics and politics
Both institutional pedagogy and self-governance pedagogy used Guattari’s concept of ‘transversality’. We consider that the complexity of such a concept and its divergent interpretations played a role in the disagreement between the two schools of thought. We will now scrutinise the definition Guattari provides towards the end of his chapter called ‘Transversality’ in Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Transversality is the unconscious source of action in [a] group, going beyond the objective laws on which it is based, carrying the group’s desire. (Guattari, 2015: 118)
Lourau claimed interest in the latent dimension of the ‘group’, as an entity. This view is based upon industrial social psychology and group dynamics, on the one hand, and WR Bion’s group theory, on the other, which we will consider later. The influence of social psychology is exemplified by Moreno’s work. Moreno (1934) conceptualised that an informal organisation of workers exists within industries, which he called the ‘sociogram’ in contrast to the ‘organigram’ (the official structure). The sociogram is revealed after analysing questionnaires where workers indicate individually who they consider with sympathy, antipathy or indifference (Anzieu and Martin, 2015: 79). Networks of sympathy are identified, which enables facilitating communications in a company. Lourau translated this view in his educational practice: A latent, informal or clandestine ‘organisation’ exists behind the most official, the most directive organisation. The specificity of self-governance can only be to unveil this [latent] organisation (in the active meaning of the term). This does not serve to leave learning with the delights and traps of spontaneity, but instead to be able to control the ever-available power of social ties. (Lourau, 1971: 260) [The master’s] knowledge does not cover the group transversality (its belongings and implicit references). As [a] working group (moment of organisation), the classroom is not raw material that the master’s speech and gaze could organise as on the first day of Creation. (Lourau, 1971)
Oury and Vasquez, in our view, would agree with Lourau that managing the group’s demand is a teacher’s fantasy (Lourau, 1971: 259). However, we suggest that they would strongly disagree with the understanding that the group always exists. The group is motivated by dissonances, misunderstandings. Transversality indicates a hole, a void in the teacher’s knowledge that cannot be filled. A group cannot ‘fill this void’ any better than a teacher, and transversality exceeds the group’s possible mastery. Transversality and reciprocity only give ‘play’ to operate subjective transformations. It is the crossing of subjects’ multiple belonging and psychological investments that appear through the variation of learners’ relationships with each technique, the teacher or the group. Vers une pédagogie institutionelle illustrates the disagreement of Oury and Vasquez with Lourau in the multiple ‘learners’ cases’ they provide. Oury’s and Vasquez’s pedagogical practice is grounded in a ‘clinical’ or ‘symptomatological’ observation of learners’ encounters, aiming in turn at providing learners with new roles to play in new settings, new groups to belong to. In other words, transversality for Oury and Vasquez is a ‘tool’ in the classroom for identifying and coping with emerging affects and emotions; in particular, fear and anxiety.
Institutional pedagogies and the wider society
Thus far we have explored how institutional pedagogues influenced structures in the classroom, and shown how Guattari’s concept of transversality was a political and a clinical tool of analysis for pedagogues. In this section, we would like to highlight that institutional pedagogues’ analysis of classrooms relies on strongly-held critical Marxist convictions that regarded both capitalistic bureaucracies and USSR state-bureaucracy with suspicion. They were well aware, long before Bourdieu’s contribution, that school plays an instrumental role in social reproduction. However, school is not the only institution enacting social reproduction; families are, too, as is the economic system. Institutional pedagogues understood emancipation as a collective battle that can hardly be fought in (even temporary) isolation, because they paid attention to the effects of the social environment on pupils and on themselves. Institutional pedagogues believed in the necessity of the classroom environment – benches and schoolbooks, pupils and teachers – to adapt to the needs of children so that children could transform themselves and grow through learning. They refused to consider that a child’s difficulty in learning was caused (only) by a psychological disability, attempting instead to identify how learning settings and relationships impair children’s curiosity and intelligence, and to correct these biases collectively with pupils.
To them, autonomy or freedom is not a personal attribute that one acquires or that free-market logics can ‘grant’ but is, rather, an individual and collective dynamic that enables and requires every agent’s equal participation. Participation in their view meant participation in the decision-making about their tasks, about collective rules and conflict resolution. Institutional pedagogues did not create the (neoliberal) illusion that one ‘participates’ when one can choose between two bad options, or that one is ‘independent’ when commands are given by an algorithm instead of a person. On the contrary, they enabled their pupils to set up goals and rules collectively, modify them when needed, collaborate with their peers and disregard competition.
Institutional pedagogies differ from many critical pedagogies by this commitment to public (state) schools and by their focus on group dynamics for learning. For example, Ranciere’s Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) can be read as advocating the need to remove the mediation of ‘teachers’ explanations’ between pupils and knowledge, while placing books and other learning material as a mediation between pupils and teacher that ‘equalises’ their respective positions. This shares similarities with institutional pedagogies, yet the latter do not share Rancière’s rejection of public (state) schools and shift the focus from individual to collective relationships with knowledge mediations. Similarly, institutional pedagogies have not constructed isolated democratic schools that always remain at risk of becoming ghettos for bourgeois children (when privately funded) or being shut down by governments (when funded by the state). Bearing in mind that French universal public schooling had been a prize won by workers’ movements in the 19th century (despite the complex political history of schooling), institutional pedagogues formed networks of mutually supportive teachers dedicated to emancipating their pupils and to remaining reflexive and critical of their own practices, while working in public schools. They supported each other’s reflexivity in discussion groups, but also supported each other when faced with the opposition of head-teachers or administration. Because institutional pedagogues practised in public schools, children did not have a choice about attending their classes, nor were class groups of mixed ages – unlike the case in many democratic schools, such as Summerhill (established in the UK in the 1920s) or Sudbury (founded in 1968 in Massachusetts, USA and the model for other ‘Sudbury’ schools worldwide). As a result, children’s motivation was not something given at the beginning of each ‘lesson’, but something to construct or restore using mediations collectively. Institutional pedagogues viewed their roles as enabling children to lift the anxiety and frustrations that block their curiosity in many school settings, by creating new collaborations among themselves and with the teachers.
Affects in classroom
As Willoughby and Demir-Atay (2016) indicated, the effects and origins of anxiety and fear in the subject development are a persistent concern in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was a central source of inspiration for Oury and Vasquez (in particular, Lacan’s theory), and interest in psychoanalysis is growing among educational researchers. Willoughby and Demir-Atay highlighted three recent pedagogical approaches informed by psychoanalysis. Archangelo (2010) reflected on the psychological effects of familial social exclusion on children’s learning – in other words, how fear and anxiety coming from specific social backgrounds impairs acquisition of knowledge and development of ability. Bibby’s (2009, 2011) multiple case studies suggested that individual anxiety and fear in the classroom can emerge or diminish depending on the style of teacher–learners relationships. Alcorn (2013) explored how teachers, in particular liberal arts teachers, can prevent or counter anxiety and fear caused by new information. Brought together, these authors identify three sources of emotion that affect the learning experience in classroom: social background, teacher–learners relationships, and knowledge content. Interestingly, Archangelo, Bibby and Alcorn based their divergent and separate research findings on the same psychoanalyst: WR Bion.
Bion proposed that ‘thinking’ is an ‘apparatus required to cope with [thoughts]’ (Bion, 1962). He is interested in understanding how this apparatus emerges and how its emergence can be hindered. Emergence of thinking as an apparatus depends on the psyche’s capacity to cope with frustration in the absence of a desired object. Thus, education (both in the family and at school) must facilitate the coping with frustration so that emergence of thinking is possible, and they must make this coping continuous because ‘K’ (knowledge) implies being confronted with further frustration: ‘K [stands in] for both the problem of realizing “knowledge” and for accepting new ideas and new people as valuable and worthy’ (Brizman, quoted in Bibby, 2009: 48). As suggested by the comparison between Archangelo, Bibby and Alcorn, three sources of frustrations may impair the acceptance of ‘new ideas and new people as valuable and worthy’; namely, classroom relationships, social background and knowledge content. Thus far we have shown that Oury and Vasquez, on the one side, and René Lourau, on the other, offer pedagogies that change the course of classroom relationships. They do so in an attempt to depart from socially inherited identifications that impair learning. However, one source of frustration remains seemingly unaddressed in institutional pedagogies: knowledge itself. Our question then is whether it is really possible to identify when anxiety arises from knowledge or from context.
The protagonists of institutional pedagogy and self-governance pedagogy disagreed on the issue of knowledge. Lourau felt that Vasquez and Oury failed to see that ‘instituted knowledge’ constituted the specificity of pedagogy as opposed to therapy. ‘Instituted knowledge’ is, according to Lourau, a key element of the political dimension of education – and, to him, hiding its political dimension renders education ideological. Acquiring knowledge (and specific curricula) responds to situated social demands. Because primary and secondary education is compulsory, very specific demands intervene in schools (Lourau, 1966: 61). The demands that school and society make of school-children is that they adhere to the knowledge and attitudes that are imposed on them (see quotation above). The parents’ demands on the child vary from family to family but embed a web of expectations on behaviour, friendships and professional outlooks. The teacher’s demands on the child varies too, and teachers themselves are the object of various social demands. However, what is always hidden or neglected is the child’s demands: ‘the absence of correspondence between the taught’s [enseigné] demand and the social demand appears to characterise the pedagogical relationships’ (Lourau, 1966: 64–65).
Lourau argued that self-governance pedagogy requires making two processes possible: (1) that learners explore the social demands impinging upon them; and (2) that their individual and collective demands as learners are addressed. According to Lourau, Oury and Vaquez’s pedagogy failed in that regard, because their practice relied upon the teacher’s ability to introduce appropriate mediations for countering learners’ neurotic behaviour. As Lourau emphatically stated it: [In Oury’s and Vasquez’s pedagogy] the master’s pragmatism contains the absolute knowledge, which enables to manipulate the relationships between him and his pupils, between the classroom and its external world, according to ‘what he judges useful’. (Lourau, 1971: 245)
This last element recalls that Lourau builds upon an aspect of Bion’s work that has remained little considered in education theory, even by the three authors previously mentioned: his analysis of group dynamics (only Bibby draws, partly, on this work, see Bibby, 2010). Bion’s observations suggest that any ‘group’ functions at two levels: the ‘work group’ (WG) and the ‘basic assumptions group’ (BAG). In brief, WG is the group as it delves into the official task for which it meets, and as its explicit organisation operates, while BAG refers to the unconscious emotional state proper to the group relating to its internal organisation and its relationships with the external society (this unconscious organisation can be phrased in ‘basic assumptions’ of dependence, fight-or-flight or coupling, and echo infantile fantasies). BAG can impair or support WG, and they vary permanently (Bion, 1961). Bion suggested that some expressions of love, anxiety or fear in a group depend on the fact that a group is gathered, not on the task it addresses, and that the state of (unconscious) group relationships influences how the group performs its tasks. Arguably, self-governance pedagogy enables learners to modify their mutual relationships and their relationships to the teacher so that the WG responds to anxieties emerging from the BAG. The group relationship to the wider society is also available for individual and collective reflexion in the questioning of the curriculum, and the bridging, or minimally the comparison, of learners’ interests with the social demand.
How does this approach differ from Alcorn’s or Bibby’s pedagogical approaches? On the one hand, Alcorn (2013) provided a detailed account of the role emotions play in learning. His work relied on Bion’s analysis of the ‘desire-not-to-know’ and its relationship to feelings of frustration. Alcorn suggested that teachers should observe and interact with emotions arising in the classroom (both the teacher’s and the learners’ emotions), and offer learners the possibility of observing, through discussion, which emotion supports or impairs their own learning. While Alcorn was concerned with the emotional effect of knowledge content in learning, he neglected the fact that some emotional states arising in the classroom depend on the group functioning instead of the content that is offered. In contrast, Bibby’s (2009) observation of teacher–learners relationships was focused entirely on how the teacher talks to children, or rather how children perceived that the teacher was addressing them. Bibby emphasised that teachers’ style of commitment to their classroom affects the learning experience possibly more than the discipline they teach. 4 However, Bibby overlooked two important aspects of classroom relationships: first, learners’ mutual relationships (independent from and/or influenced by the teacher); and, second, learners’ interpretation (or supposition) of the teacher’s behaviour. 5
Institutional pedagogies offer a response to aspects neglected by Alcorn and Bibby. Lourau explored learners’ mutual relationships in the classroom based on Bion’s group theory – and addressed them through the Council. Learners’ interpretation of the teacher’s behaviour was explicitly addressed in the classroom by Oury and Vasquez’s introduction of mediations allowing teachers to depart from the position of parental imago, and implicitly addressed in self-governance pedagogy through teachers’ non-directive attitude. Bion’s group theory suggests that collective perception and reaction to the WG leader (in the classroom: the teacher) depends not only on individual fantasy, as Oury and Vasquez thought, but also on the basic assumption that holds the group together.
Taking all these aspects into account, identifying whether fear and anxiety can arise from specific knowledge contents, rather than from the settings where this content is introduced, becomes problematic. In Lourau’s words, schools and teachers act on the assumption that ‘the master can take distance, even criticizing or negating his knowledge. The learner must institutionally adhere to and identify oneself with knowledge’ (Lourau, 1966: 69). This assumption permeates the teacher’s and learners’ attitudes in the classroom and places learners in a defensive position. By contrast, institutional pedagogies can be considered as propositions for offering adequate time, space and organisation for learners to cope with their own emotions when learning, and to adopt a positive attitude towards knowledge guided by curiosity, enabling learners to adopt a critical stance towards society’s institutions.
Conclusion: contribution of institutional pedagogies to philosophy of education
Institutional pedagogies were developed in the 1960s in an attempt to create emancipatory education. Their practice was based on two structural analyses of relationships in classrooms. Lourau’s self-governance pedagogy begins with a political–structural approach to education that emphasises how teacher–learners relationships to knowledge impede exchange and communication in directive pedagogies. Lourau’s approach is also political insofar as it empowers learners by allowing them organise learning activities collectively, question the curriculum, and understand power dynamics in a group. In contrast, Oury and Vasquez’s institutional pedagogy begins with a clinical–structural analysis of the teacher’s traditional stance in the classroom, anticipating the risk of reinforcing learners’ individual neuroses by becoming a new parental figure. Introducing mediations and bringing new roles into play enable learners to adopt new identifications and transform their subjectivities while acquiring new abilities, i.e. learning.
The emphasis of institutional pedagogies on group dynamics sheds light on understanding what SOLE projects and the transformability paradigm have begun to explore. Institutional pedagogies invite the latter approaches to question their proposition further. First, the transformability paradigm might benefit from more systematic investigations of classroom and subjective conditions at stake in school. Second, the emancipatory character of SOLE might appear limited because the traditional ‘absolute knowledge’ is transferred from the teacher onto the computer or the Internet. Indeed, computers might actually not be required to enable ‘self-organised learning’, as the practice of self-governance pedagogy suggests. Computers are yet another tool for learning and becoming informed, as books, documentaries, and people (e.g. professionals or experts) have always been. Limiting a learner’s tools of investigation to the Internet – however rich it is – is problematic: it risks masking the socio-political character of computers. We wonder, for example, what web browser, search engine and informational resources are used or suggested in SOLE, and whether the Internet, its origins, developments and socio-economic functioning are offered to learners as something for investigation.
Furthermore, regarding affects at play in classrooms, institutional pedagogies pose further challenges to current psychoanalytical approaches of education. We have shown that although the affective impacts on learning of social background (Archangelo), teacher–learners relationship (Bibby), and knowledge (Alcorn) have become the subjects of scrutiny based on Bion’s theory of thinking, these authors have failed to consider two aspects relating to these objects. First, as Oury and Vasquez emphasise, learners tend to repeat their neurosis produced in family by fantasizing the teacher as a parental figure – something the teacher can avoid only by stepping back from a parental-like stance. Second, some effects emerging in the classroom, regarding both knowledge and the teacher, are inherently related to the fact that learning occurs in a group, as Bion’s theory of group suggests. There is an informal, unconscious organisation of the group that could strengthen learners’ participation if it were taken into account, as Lourau proposed.
The group dimension of the classroom and its effects have long been overlooked in education theory. Institutional pedagogy and self-governance pedagogy have revealed the radical implications of considering both dimensions: occurring in a group, education is necessarily and jointly political and clinical. Neglecting these aspects leads either to an ‘ideological’ education, which obliterates the social demands commanding schooling, to a ‘pathogenic’ education, which continues or worsens learners’ neuroses, or both. Actualising institutional pedagogies would require taking into account how society has changed and what new fields of emancipation have emerged since the 1960s. For example, it would be interesting to link their attention to group dynamics with recent observations of (lesser) public participation of marginalised groups (marginalised by gender, religion, race or disability, for example) and observe how teaching can help in countering these trends (see also Hooks, 1994). Institutional pedagogues have overlooked this dimension of group dynamics, perhaps because they have operated in homogenous class groups (both in terms of gender and of socio-economic background). The techniques they used as mediations should also be adapted critically to current social media: a renewed institutional pedagogy could allow children to explore the social, political and economic stakes of these new technologies when using them. We hope that this presentation of institutional pedagogies will encourage educational researchers to explore further the transformative power of group dynamics and group effects in classrooms.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this article has been received from Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS. (Grant/ Award Number: Université de Liège, Grant/ Award Number: Non-Fria Grant).