De l’individu et des violences à l’école. L’expérience des professeurs débutants

Abstract

Young teachers in first post are confronted by students and by behaviours to which, for the most part, they are unaccustomed. The dual exigency of getting the students to work and of asserting one''s authority calls for a commitment, both personal and relational, which goes beyond the given roles and norms of a pedagogical relationship. The uncertainty and the unpredictability of situations whose complexity cannot be reduced to definitions of institutional contexts nor to different types of students, calls into play the perceptive, interpretative and reactive schemas of each person involved, which are the source of misunderstandings, conflicts of interpretation and violent outcomes, mostly verbal and symbolic. This testing out of oneself which goes with the feeling of exercising a hazardous profession makes teachers look for team support, but this is not sufficient in itself. A critical reflection of oneself and especially of one''s own attitude to authority, even paradoxically at the risk of being '' self aggressive'' is one of the ways of creating the teaching conditions which the idealized and partly internalised educative model tends to exclude.