Education in debate: comparative analysis
Education in debate: comparative analysis (ISSN 1660-7147) is an international, peer-reviewed open access online journal that publishes academic work in French and English on contemporary educational issues from a critical and international perspective. Via inspirED, we also offer a platform for researchers, education professionals and members of civil society organizations to engage in critical analysis on topics related to the areas covered by the journal.
Revue coordonnée par eduCoop. L’Université de Genève héberge la revue pour le compte du comité.
Éditorial. Pratiques professionnelles pour favoriser l’inclusion de tous/tes les élèves
Copyright (c) 2025 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Éditorial. Culture et éducation : le flou d’un rapport à soi, aux autres, au monde
From the internationalization to the interculturalization of research: A case study
Systematic education challenges facing refugees’ children in urban centres in Kenya
Refugee children faced war, violence, and trauma in their home countries before fleeing, and they continue to face unprecedented challenges once they arrive in their new country. They must adjust to a new political, economic, and cultural environment, as well as new education systems, customs, and language once they arrive in the host country. Most of the refugees are still encamped, while others have found ways to relocate to cities. A growing body of evidence suggests that education for refugees is less sustainable, frequently of lower quality, less accountable to families and children, and has fewer mechanisms in place for learners’ formal completion or certification. Despite the existence of a draft Education Policy for Refugees and Asylum-Seekers (2019) and the government’s efforts to expand educational opportunities for refugee children by allowing refugee children to enroll in public schools, most urban refugees face numerous barriers to integration into mainstream education. This study employed a qualitative case study design using semi-structured interviews with 20 teachers, 10 school administrators, three education officers and focus group discussions with 100 learners, complemented by document analysis. The data show that, while refugee access and retention have improved, many refugee children drop out of school, with many never enrolling in school. The main findings highlighted several challenges, such as a lack of teacher preparedness to work with refugee children, difficulties in using the language of instruction, and the impact of hidden costs, as well as learning outcomes and expectations in the classroom.
Copyright (c) 2026 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dire JE en classe de langue : un nouvel objectif spécifique pour les étudiant-es en mobilité académique
This article focuses on two teaching experiments: an intensive FLE course for incoming exchange students at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) – based on photographs taken between 2020 and 2021, bringing together class discussions around themes such as “an object in my suitcase” or “a day’s diary” - and a didactics workshop in which future foreign language teachers enrolled in a FLE bachelor's degree analyzed the written and oral productions resulting from the first experiment, in 2024. Inventories of speech acts were compiled, corresponding to the exchange students’ desires to say and to be said during their first days in Switzerland, and new teaching methods on the same themes were envisaged. This dialogue raises the question of what acceptance of the word culture corresponds to the (inter-) cultural learning objectives of students in a situation of “landing” in the Swiss context.
Performance, accomplissement et participation : l’école captive de projets sans fin
Taking “social structure” as our starting point, we see cultures as social constructs, progressively institutionalized and crystallized, in perpetual transformation. This understanding of cultures allows us to question what the introduction of a set of conventions – formalized in a concept about inclusive school (Vaud, Switzerland) – does in the cultures of teaching professions. This concept assumes the coexistence of distinct universes, through a lexical field combining performance, control, functioning versus participation, equality, self-fulfillment. The objectives are, in fact, to strengthen a culture of educability while providing “a structured and efficient response to all of the school’s needs.” This coexistence is reflected in the accounts of professional experiences shared during group analysis carried out during in-service training addressed to qualified teachers, to develop skills in line with the inclusive aims of school. It appears that the achievement of this aim is hampered by an absence/insufficiency of conventions and a coexistence of rival conventions, weighing on teachers’ well-being. On this basis, we identify professional tensions that can be described as “cultural” and articulated around five of the seven worlds modeled by Boltanski, Thévenot and Chiapello.
La conversation anthropologique comme alternative au projet d’« éducation interculturelle » du Conseil de l’Europe : réflexions critiques à partir de l’enseignement-apprentissage du FLE
By revisiting some aspects of a didactic sequence carried out in a beginner-level French as a Foreign Language (FLE) class around the concept of intercultural encounter, this article examines the types of difficulties a language and culture teacher might face in his/her improvisations and experiments when trying to incorporate an anthropological, non-essentializing, and non-differentialist view of culture into his/her teaching. Drawing from an anthropology of education influenced by the work of Ingold, ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Cavell), and anthropology inspired by it (Das, Bazin, Motta), the author shifts the perspective from “intercultural encounter” to “anthropological conversation,” understood as an ordinary conversation where everyone is placed in the position of the learner, and where mutual education about what it means to live a human life is always already taking place. From this perspective, offered as an alternative to the unrealistic and potentially conflict-laden conceptions of culture underpinning the European "intercultural education" project, the author provides a critical reading of a number of key texts from the Council of Europe, highlighting several preconceptions, including an essentializing, differentialist, and nationalist conception of culture; the illusion of an ego-ethnocentric human nature; and the denial of social actors’ ordinary capacity to live together.
Des pratiques inclusives qui soutiennent la situation d’inclusion d’élèves francophones issu-es de l’immigration récente en classe ordinaire du primaire
Développer par la recherche-action une collaboration interprofessionnelle et interorganisationnelle dans une perspective inclusive
Pratiques déclarées d’enseignantes de première année du primaire auprès d’élèves immigrant-es qui sont en apprentissage du français : quelle place pour une éducation inclusive ?
Favoriser l’éducation inclusive à travers les relations école-famille immigrante et réfugiée : analyse de récits de pratique de directions d’établissement
Quelle place y a-t-il pour la pédagogie culturellement pertinente dans les classes d’accueil du secondaire au Québec ?
Défis persistants dans le développement de pratiques interculturelles et inclusives en milieu scolaire multiethnique : le cas d’une école primaire au Québec
Quand les microagressions raciales défient l’inclusion : actions sous tension de directions d’écoles engagées pour la justice sociale
Droit à l’éducation : combattre les inégalités en relevant les défis de la privatisation, de la digitalisation et des situations de crise
The Geneva Dialogue on the Right to Education was held on 18 and 19 June 2024 and organized in partnership with UNESCO, the University of Geneva, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the REGARD network. The rich sessions provided an opportunity to examine the trends, challenges, and opportunities related to equitable access to quality education. Discussions focused on the impact of privatization, digitalization, and crises on the right to education, as well as the effectiveness of human rights mechanisms in addressing these 21st-century challenges. This paper summarizes the main discussions and makes recommendations for the future.
Copyright (c) 2024 The Author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Les changements pédagogiques à l’école : analyse d’une réforme des devoirs à domicile dans le canton de Berne
This article looks at the nature and process of educational change in schools. On the one hand, it attempts to understand how schools change and what this change entails when it is pedagogical in nature. In the first part, we propose a theoretical framework for constructing an operational concept of social change by looking at its object, context and sequences of action. These elements make it possible to distinguish different types and realities of change and to specify how change can be considered pedagogical. After a brief explanation of the methodology used to collect and analyze the data, centered on comprehensive interviews, we look at how teachers understand the reforms and translate them into their teaching methods. We present some results of cross-sectional analyses from a doctoral thesis. This enables us to contextualize this complex, multifactorial process and gain a better understanding of how educational reforms are implemented by the players involved.
La mise en œuvre de la collaboration école-familles : de l’interprétation des prescriptions institutionnelles à leur réappropriation par les enseignant-es
Faced with the growing challenges of schooling, school-family collaboration is an essential means of combating school failure and inequality in Geneva's primary education system. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of how teachers interpret and reappropriate the injunction to collaborate in the day-to-day practices of their profession. The aim is also to identify the collaborative strategies and practices implemented by teachers according to their interpretation of this injunction. The corpus on which the results are based is made up of in situ observations of meetings between teachers and parents, semi-structured interviews with teachers, and institutional documents framing school-family collaboration. Analysis of the data reveals that the definition of school-family collaboration remains vague and implicit, leaving it open to interpretation by teachers. As a result, they implement collaborative strategies and practices to ensure that collaboration with parents meets their needs and enables them to overcome the difficulties they encounter. Ultimately, the study shows that this is an asymmetrical collaboration, in which inequalities in parental participation play a part and can exacerbate social and educational inequalities.
Le rôle des directions d’établissement dans la mise en œuvre de la collaboration entre éducateurs/trices et enseignant-es dans l’enseignement prioritaire à Genève
This article analyzes the role of school principals in implementing collaboration between teachers and educators in the Priority Education Network (REP) schools in Geneva, Switzerland. Drawing on the sociology of organizations and the work of Mintzberg (2006), the study investigates the challenges of coordinating professionals with differing cultural backgrounds. The methodology is based on 35 semi-structured interviews with principals, teachers and educators in seven REP primary schools. The results show that collaboration is hampered by distinct professional cultures and that mediation by school principals is complicated by dual hierarchical systems. However, some headteachers succeed in establishing fruitful collaborations when they strengthen communication, clarify the roles and responsibilities of each, and promote a mutual understanding of objectives and working methods. In other words, principals who adopt a position of neutrality and effective mediation facilitate harmonious and effective collaboration between teachers and educators. Thus, applying Mintzberg’s (2006) coordination mechanisms makes it possible not only to identify the challenges, but also to discern the conditions necessary for successful implementation of interprofessional collaboration in the Geneva REP.
Développer la qualité de l’école, mais prudemment : le difficile exercice d’équilibrisme des cadres d'une administration scolaire
Quality development is an ambitious but necessary project for who runs an education system. While institutional texts claim to consider parents as partners, what place does the institution give them in such a process? An ethnographic study carried out within the school administration of the canton of Fribourg (Switzerland) shows the many pitfalls encountered by managers in implementing a quality policy: confronted on all sides, and first and foremost internally, with the diversity of views on what schools are and should be, managers proceed cautiously, seeking to allay the fears of professionals in the field, to convince rather than impose, in order to avoid resistance and conflicts that would call the process into question. Since the relationship between school and families is a major source of tension within the teaching profession, the involvement of parents in the quality development process was seen as one threat too many, and parents were kept out of the process. Beyond the issue of school-family partnership, it is the possibility for managers to lead a policy that is implemented by all schools that is questioned.
School principals as key actors in the implementation of educational policies: perspectives from the Integral Education Program (PEI) in São Paulo State, Brazil
The article analyzes the role of school principals in implementing the Integral Education Program (PEI) in São Paulo (Brazil). The primary assumption was that school principals have a fundamental role in implementing educational policies locally, as they are positioned as mediators of the interests of the public education system and the community where they work. Interviews and on-site observation were carried out in four PEI schools in the State of São Paulo. We analyzed the role of school principals in the adherence process of teachers, students, and families to the program. The data demonstrated that school principals’ strong adherence to the policy was decisive for its implementation locally. The principals led the other school actors to vote in favor of the program, acting as sense-makers.
Reprendre la main. Les PIAL, une tentative pour maîtriser la réussite de l’école inclusive
In the field of “French-style” school inclusion for pupils with disabilities, the recent innovation of the Pôles inclusifs d’accompagnement localisés (PIALs) involves structuring support for these pupils on a territory-wide basis. Based on a qualitative survey, this contribution aims to analyze the ways in which these PIALs have been implemented in the Lyon education district. On the basis of a documentary analysis, observation of a series of launch meetings and around fifteen interviews, it shows that the PIALs have initially resulted in a focus on rationalizing the working hours of the Accompagnantes des élèves en situation de handicap (AESH), a non-teaching staff with insecure status, whose recruitment is beyond the control of the Éducation Nationale. The variable geometry of the system allows for a wide range of management methods for these staff, resulting in PIALs operating in very different ways from one school district to another. Beyond this “managerial reduction“ (Laforgue, 2005), the study shows that the PIAL is indicative of a policy through organization (Knoepfel, et al., 2015) that restores to the education state some of its capacities weakened by the departmentalization of public action on disability.
Éditorial. Réguler la mise en œuvre des politiques éducatives. Acteurs/trices, instruments et stratégies
Faire culture commune : la classe en architecture
The architecture classroom experience offers an alternative pedagogical approach focused on observation and collective perception. This implementation uses a tripartite observation method — formal description, hypotheses, and research — to integrate the three pillars of artistic and cultural education: knowledge acquisition, encounter, and practice. By highlighting the expression and the diversity of views, the project does not only enable a technical acquisition but also a deeper cultural awareness. The implementation is analyzed through a direct observation study with a phenomenological approach. The choice of architecture as a guiding thread illustrates how a subject can link theoretical and practical knowledge while encouraging a collective approach to learning. This model does not only allow the transmission of general culture, but it also helps build a shared culture between pupils and teachers, thereby answering inclusion and sociocultural diversity issues. By highlighting the importance of a pedagogy that transcends standardized general culture, this project illustrates a way of “making common culture” based on the three pillars of artistic and cultural education. It could thus inspire other initiatives aiming at creating more inclusive, collaborative, and enriching learning environments for the members of an education community.
Culture et diversité dans la formation du corps enseignant : une réflexion anthropologique et pédagogique
This article explores teacher training for cultural diversity from an anthropological and pedagogical perspective. It is set against the backdrop of a globalized society where cultural interactions and identity tensions are omnipresent, and where intercultural approaches are struggling to take root in concrete educational practices. Through an autoethnographic approach, the article highlights the importance of overcoming fixed conceptions of culture to transform the professional posture of the teaching profession. The analysis is based on two main axes: a critique of universalist and static conceptions of culture, illustrated by founding anthropological theories, and an exploration of relational and critical approaches centered on the fluidity of identities and social interactions. The aim is to encourage teachers to adopt a reflective and critical stance, promoting an open and dynamic Weltanschauung (worldview). This approach proposes a transformative intercultural education that recognizes and transcends diversity to meet the complex challenges of contemporary societies.
Quel sens donner à la notion de « cultures religieuses » ? Prescrits scolaires, débats disciplinaires et pédagogiques
As much as the religious phenomenon is approached through the category of culture(s), the notion of culture(s) does not generally go without that of religion(s). Only one subject in the Plan d'études romand (PER) for schools in Switzerland explicitly contains the word culture: Ethics and religious cultures. What does “religious cultures” mean in this curriculum? This article takes a hermeneutic approach. First of all, an analysis of the PER reveals a certain polysemy of the term: it cannot be seen as a simple school transposition of a scientific discipline, but requires a consideration of its epistemological and pedagogical dimensions. The article then examines the links between religion(s) and culture(s) in the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences; noting their diversity, it focuses on anthropology and raises the question of a critical interpretation of religion, oscillating between exemplarity and an unthinking of culture. The last section examines the relationship between culture and religious cultures in pedagogy: starting from the didactic debate on the teaching about religions and from a model of five conceptions of culture in education, it argues for a humanistic conception of the interpretation of existence, leading to the hermeneutic and interdisciplinary educational perspectives of a “meaning to be constructed.”
La culture dans et pour penser l’école : enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques pour la recherche
The reluctance of researchers to resort to the term “culture” reflects their fear of freezing or reducing phenomena. To turn it into a dynamic concept, it is necessary to move away from the common uses of the term and to question the epistemological and methodological stakes of our research. This article is part of a reflection that questions the ways in which research is conducted, transmitted, and communicated. We draw from our investigations an analysis of official documents from primary education in Geneva, ethnographic observations made in schools, and research interviews conducted with teachers and student-teachers in training. In the first part, we describe the uses of the term “culture” in our fieldwork. For the institution, culture refers both to an aim of transmission and to the recognition of the diversity of the audience. For teachers, multiculturality implicitly designates a disadvantaged environment and is a source of professional difficulties. These plural uses of the term culture lead us, in the second part, to question our ways of conducting research. Drawing on Ingold’s work, we develop the concept of depth and its implications on the research relationship. Developing a deep relationship with participants allows for the co-construction of a shared understanding of the world, beyond pre-existing categories.
Éditorial. Regards pluriels sur l’interculturel en éducation : Quelles perspectives pour penser l’éducation à la citoyenneté ?
Co-construire une éducation à la citoyenneté en contexte interculturel
This article presents ethnographic data from a survey of high school students in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. The Affirmatif project, the quantitative results of which are also presented in this issue, concerns the relationship of high school students to citizenship. This is a sensitive issue in classrooms and schools, sometimes causing difficulties for teachers and educational teams (Chauvigné & Fabre, 2021). Nevertheless, it has aroused the interest of schools, the support of teachers and the involvement of students. Can research, without giving in to scientific constraints, be integrated into schools and support teachers in tackling sensitive issues and proposing solutions? The participation of researchers in the field has allowed us to create ethnographic notebooks and to move towards a reciprocity of exchange (Bensa, 2008), opening up prospects for a new project based on participatory research practices (Bednarz, et al., 2015; Morissette, 2015; Roy, 2021). This aims to co-construct citizenship education in an intercultural context, in a territory characterized by diversity and strong social inequalities.
Socialisation citoyenne et représentations de l’altérité : apprendre à re-connaitre les points de vue des élèves avant d’ « éduquer à… »
In this article, we present some thoughts on how to educate adolescents about a sense of “Us” based on the idea of diversity. Top-down pedagogical approaches are challenged alongside more horizontal and participatory approaches. The ANR Affirmatif allowed us to carry out a first quantitative survey on how adolescent high school students react to the issues raised by international human migration and their expectations of schools in terms of citizenship socialization. We interviewed 1,300 high school students in the PACA region of southern France (M age 16.7). The framework that emerges is multidimensional: a) school does not really seem to be a context for political socialization, even though students have high expectations of education on diversity, b) the issues raised by international immigration are a fact that is well established in their representations of society, even though some of the issues it raises are approached with a fearful eye, c) adherence to republican values generates unexpected effects on prejudices and representations of diversity. In the discussion, we emphasize the importance of carrying out participatory and horizontal citizenship education initiatives that, first and foremost, recognize the opinions and representations of students without any prejudice on the part of the teaching staff.
Hors du social, de la culture et du monde, mais pas hors de soi ni de l’entre-soi : comment une relation pédagogique peut ne pas être citoyenne ?
How to train interculturally for citizenship? The international convergence in the field of training in favor of interculturality, lively questions (Legardez & Simmonneaux, 2011), skills, reflexivity (Joly, 2022; Lucy, 2023), take place in the double panorama, broader, older and universal, of the articulation between citizenship (Schnapper, 2000) and social inequalities (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970; Lahire, et al., 2019). Everywhere, citizenship is then perceived from the point of view of the systemic risk of ethnocentrism, the driving force of educational inequalities, which must be neutralized in order to develop real universal reflexive capacities on intercultural issues and, more broadly, on all issues of global relevance. Our empirical example is ideal-typical of the attitude in the development of future teachers as professional intellectuals, whose de facto ethnocentrism remains, in our opinion, the main obstacle to any interculturalism. The solution lies in the universal model of a distant relationship with this self (Schön, 1994), against an inter-personality that prevents any stepping out of oneself, synonymous with reflexivity, the main obstacle to real training, whose origin lies in their relationship with the educational institution, which favors a citizenship of self cut off from society, culture and the world.