Autonomy, autonomisation and the Council of Europe: the interdependence of pedagogy and politics

Abstract

The Council of Europe’s educational projects have always been designed to support its political purpose, which is to promote and defend human rights, democratic governance and the rule of law. This article traces the fluctuating fortunes of the Council’s engagement with the educational concepts of autonomy and autonomisation with reference to three main phases of its work: (a) the adult education project of the 1970s, which was the context in which Henri Holec wrote his ground-breaking report Autonomy and foreign language learning; (b) the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and its companion piece the European Language Portfolio (ELP), developed in the 1990s and launched in 2001; and (c) the concept of plurilingual and intercultural education as outlined in the CEFR and further developed in the 2000s in the project Languages in Education, Languages for Education, which offers a basis for the educational inclusion of migrants and minority-language students. The article argues that although the adult education project of the 1970s provided an enduring conceptual framework, the hope that the ELP would lead to the widespread autonomisation of language learners foundered on the absence of appropriately receptive pedagogical traditions. However, a radical interpretation of the so-called plurilingual approach to education returns autonomy and autonomisation to centre stage.