French Public Schools Research Articles

Gifted Students’ Special Educational Programs in France: An Analysis of Students’ Needs as Perceived by Headmasters — A Secondary Publication

Some French public middle schools offer gifted students the opportunity to pursue their education in general classes, while benefiting from specific facilities within the framework of a dedicated educational program. In this study, we sought to identify and analyze the needs of these students as perceived by the headmaster of each middle school involved. The results highlight two main student needs, common to all these programs (uneasiness and difficulties in peer relationships) as well as needs specifically mentioned by some headmasters (non-adaptive behavior).

On Turbans, Abayas, and Colanders: The Scope of Religious Dress in a Pluralistic Society

Abstract This article scrutinizes the ongoing European debate surrounding religious attire, particularly in the context of legal restrictions and requests for accommodation. The core inquiry revolves around the ambiguous definition of ‘religious dress’, encompassing both prescribed attire and symbols with religious significance. Beyond conventional religious garments that are generally legally accepted, the article delves into the contentious classification of cultural styles, as seen recently with the ban on abayas and qamis in French public schools, and the exemptions for ‘religious dress’ claimed by adherents to mock religions such as Pastafarianism. Acknowledging the contested nature of defining religion, the article examines the potential necessity for legal definitions, emphasizing their role in determining both recognition and limitations. The study navigates the European legal framework, drawing insights from supranational sources and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights to unravel the intricacies, challenges, and implications of regulating religion and religious dress in Europe.

Rethinking laïcité as a geopolitical concept

ABSTRACT Laïcité, France’s idiosyncratic religious neutrality, is a concept that governs significant aspects of daily life while being notoriously variable in its application. Alongside sociological, legal and historical understandings of laïcité, I propose an additional way to view laïcité: through a critical geopolitical perspective. I argue that laïcité has been made and unmade through geographic imaginaries and practices through which idealised modes of universal citizenship confront and negotiate with affiliations to faith and culture to produce hegemonic ideas about the place of religious identity in French society. In particular, this confrontation has occurred within the French public school system, the école républicaine. I argue that laïcité, as it is manifested through educational policies as well as geographic imaginaries, reflects a will to forge a nationally unified citizenry as well as ambivalence about the need to negotiate with locally rooted cultural identities. I illustrate this through the phenomenon of student infringements, or atteintes, against laïcité: while these are framed as a grave threat to republican unity requiring national interventions, there has nevertheless been a consistent lack of spatially specific official knowledge of where atteintes take place.

The Prosaic Stateness of Secularism: Diversity, Incoherence and Divergence in the Application of laïcité

ABSTRACT France’s idiosyncratic form of secularism, laïcité, is a highly contested principle bound up in centuries of conflict over the state’s relationship to religious practice. Of late, commentators have interpreted it as taking somewhat of an authoritarian turn as it is used to disproportionately identify and suppress signs of overt Muslim religiosity, including notably within the public school system. I apply Painter’s ‘prosaic stateness’ framework to understand how educators interpret and rework laïcité within the French public school to produce ‘actually-existing’ laïcité. In particular, I show that educators are situated within three ‘spatialities’ through which laïcité inhabits French schooling: the idealised space of the French republic set against religious obscurantism, schools as spaces of inviolable neutrality, and risky bodies who refuse to conform to norms of republican citizenship. Within these spatialities, educators enact a prosaic stateness of laïcité through their experiences of diversity of the student populations they serve, the incoherence of the institution they work for, and the divergence of the policies they end up applying.

‘Yes, but you were born in France’: Practiced language policies with culturally and linguistically diverse students in an elementary classroom in France

This case study investigated the practiced language policies of a French elementary school educator, Catherine, as she implemented the French National Cycle of instruction for the early elementary grades with a culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) class of students. The findings revealed that macro-level policies—such as curriculum and teaching practices perpetuated monolingual ideologies and an overall republican goal of integration—limited Catherine’s practices in her work with CLD students. The study highlights the critical need for continuing reform in practices in teacher education and development in France, as well as in the ways that CLD students are served in French public schools.

Effects of Montessori Education on the Academic, Cognitive, and Social Development of Disadvantaged Preschoolers: A Randomized Controlled Study in the French Public-School System.

Previous research on Montessori preschool education is inconsistent and prone to analytic flexibility. In this preregistered study, disadvantaged preschoolers in a French public school were randomly assigned to either conventional or Montessori classrooms, with the latter being adapted to French public education. Adaptations included fewer materials, shorter work periods, and relatively limited Montessori teacher training. Cross‐sectional analyses in kindergarten (N = 176; M age = 5–6) and longitudinal analyses over the 3 years of preschool (N = 70; M age = 3–6) showed that the adapted Montessori curriculum was associated with outcomes comparable to the conventional curriculum on math, executive functions, and social skills. However, disadvantaged kindergarteners from Montessori classrooms outperformed their peers on reading (d = 0.68). This performance was comparable to that of advantaged children from an accredited Montessori preschool.

Manufacturing controversy: “reverse racism” as backlash to antiracist interventions in France

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the paradoxes of mainstream French anti- racism regarding Islamophobia. The authors focus on the driving role played by French republican values in the recurring inability of anti-racist activism, and anti-islamophobia in particular, to act upon the structural character of racism in France.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ analysis draws on a longitudinal and qualitative investigation of the “Sud-Education 93” controversy (SE93). The authors use the analytical framework provided by controversy studies in order to focus on the aftermath, in the public sphere, of the organisation by a French labour union of a minority-only workshop designed to provide teachers with a space for expression and purposeful guidance, in order to face Islamophobia and racism issues within French public schools. The authors collected an exhaustive set of data about the comments, criticisms and debates that emerged in the public sphere as a reaction to the workshop. The authors drew on situational analysis methodology, providing controversy analysts with several power-mapping techniques, in order to conduct a discursive analysis of the statements and claims made by the protagonists of the controversy.FindingsFirst, the authors’ insights point out that French Islamophobia relies on the myth of the universal republican citizen that acts as a context-specific form of colour-blindism. Second, the authors shed light on the discursive and relational mechanisms that characterise the denial of Islamophobia undertaken by political actors who use “reverse racism” arguments as a form of backlash, i.e. a strategy of “fragility” (DiAngelo, 2018) consisting in maintaining artificially a never-ending controversy over Islamophobia. Finally, the authors discuss the role played by these strategies of fragility in the recurring rejection of anti-islamophobia activism in France and the limitations and prospects they embody for future forms of anti-racist strategies.Research limitations/implicationsThe Latourian perspective adopted in the paper focuses on the implications of the controversy over Islamophobia within the public sphere. The authors’ fieldwork suggests, however, that the internal dynamics of minority-only organisations embodies sites and répertoires of micro-contestation capable of bypassing on the short run, and perhaps overthrowing, the power of French hypocrisy about anti-racism and the backlash processes the authors observed in the public sphere.Originality/valueThe authors’ contribution lies in the in-depth analysis of “reverse racism” rhetorics as a strategy of fragility and its implications in terms of colour-blindism and backlash.

Conceptions About Electrical Circuits Of English And French Pupils From Nova Scotia In Canada: English And French Conceptions On Electric Circuits

This research study was designed to identify the conceptual understandings of 89 students from the region of Clare in French-language public schools and 105 students from the Argyle region in French immersion public schools in Canada on the operation of simple electrical circuits. To this end, they completed a pencil-and-paper questionnaire of sixty minutes in duration. The analyses of the data show clearly the preponderance of erroneous understandings by students related to the concepts of current and voltage among other related concepts identified in the international review of the literature. Thus, despite the cultural and language differences, their conceptual understandings related to the simple electrical circuit are similar. A conclusion and didactical impact are included.

Conceptions about Electrical Circuits of English and French Pupils from Nova Scotia in Canada

The present research was intended to identify the conceptual of 84 students from the region of Clare in French-language public schools and 54 from the Argyle region in French immersion public schools in Canada on the operation of simple electrical circuits. To this end, they completed a pencil-and-paper questionnaire of sixty minutes duration. The analyses of the data show clearly the preponderance of erroneous conceptions about the current and voltage concepts like those identified in the international review of the literature. Thus, despite the cultural and language differences, their conceptual understandings related to the simple electrical circuit are similar.

Laïcité as assimilation, laïcité as negotiation: Political geographies of secularism in the French public school

Laïcité, France's idiosyncratic form of secularism, is a complex concept that is dense with historical genealogy, practical contradictions and – crucially – political geographies. In particular, contemporary laïcité is characterized by a state-sponsored model of universal citizenship that regards French Muslims' identity claims with mistrust. This tension, always latent, was brought to the fore by a series of attacks perpetrated self-styled jihadists in January 2015, centered on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo notorious for its provocations against Islam. The attacks and their aftermath also highlighted a key space where conflicts over laïcité often play out: the French public school, the école républicaine. This institution was conceived in its modern form as a mechanism to assimilate through laïque pedagogy. Today it is a highly visible space where the optics of race and gender contribute to a narrative of Muslim communautarisme, a willful and defiant communalism that rejects the republican community of citizens.Following a handful of incidents in which students refused to participate in a moment of silence for the victims of the January 2015 attacks, the Ministry of Education undertook an initiative involving disciplinary and pedagogical supports for laïcité in the schools, called the Great Mobilisation for the Republic's Values. Like other past interventions in this area, it operationalizes an assimilating vision of laïcité to bring recalcitrant peripheries into compliance with republican norms. At the same time, though, it reveals the agency of the peripheries to negotiate the terms of laïcité according to local knowledge and needs. On the basis of interviews with educators serving in schools where elements of the Grand Mobilisation were carried out, I show how they push back against the overarching narratives that characterize the initiative and in so doing construct localized and nuanced understandings of the laïque social pact.

Food marketers at school: The challenge of trustworthiness in France (1900-2013)

This article focuses on the evolution of the relationships between food marketing communication and public education in France from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Firstly a broad historical reconstruction of the extension of food marketing communication to the sphere of public school is proposed. References to school in advertisements aimed at children in the postwar years are explored. The increase of various in-school marketing actions carried out by food companies from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s are examined such as the emergence of new forms of partnership between food marketers and French public schools following the introduction in the 1990s of the annual event La Semaine du Goût and the rapid generalization of new “educational” approaches. Secondly, the educational and normative character of recent food communication aimed at pupils, proposed by institutes and foundations linked with food multinationals, is analyzed and the ways in which these forms of in-school marketing try to converge with the principles of public health policy are elucidated.

Secularism and state neutrality: the headscarf in French and German public schools

ABSTRACTIn recent years, both Germany and France have been confronted with the question of whether religious clothing could be worn in public schools. In France, the wearing of the Islamic headscarf aroused considerable unrest in many secular public schools during the 1990s. Legislation was enacted in 2004 to prohibit visible religious signs or clothing in public schools although, at the time, there was confusion over which signs or clothing would be prohibited. These concerns were justified – in April 2015, a Muslim schoolgirl was sent home from school for wearing a long black skirt deemed to be ‘ostentatious’ religious clothing. Similarly, since the mid-2000s, laws in different German federal states have prohibited public school staff from displaying religious, political, or ideological symbols. In January 2015 the German Federal Constitutional Court assessed the constitutionality of such laws, with far-reaching consequences. This paper focuses on the different legal and cultural responses to the wearing of religious clothing in German and French public schools. The paper also notes that it is particularly important, in light of recent events in both Germany and France, that the two countries’ responses not divide their communities in the name of secularism, neutrality, or national cohesion.

Investigation of formaldehyde sources in French schools using a passive flux sampler

While indoor air quality issues have received increasing attention the past decades, detailed investigations of primary sources of indoor pollution are still difficult to carry out. There is a lack of analytical tools and measurement procedures to identify sources of pollutants and to characterize their emissions. Formaldehyde is a ubiquitous pollutant in indoor environments, which is known to lead to adverse health effects. This study describes a measurement procedure to apportion formaldehyde emissions from building and furnishing materials and presents a source apportionment study performed in French public schools. More than 29 sources of formaldehyde were characterized in each investigated classroom, with higher emissions from building materials compared to furnishing materials. Formaldehyde emission rates measured using passive flux samplers (PFS) range from 1.2 to 252 μg/m2/h, highlighting several strong emitters made of wood products and foam. Interestingly, the ceiling was identified as the main source of formaldehyde in most classrooms. Measured emissions and air exchange rates were constrained in a mass balance model to evaluate the impact of formaldehyde reduction strategies. These results indicate that formaldehyde concentrations can be reduced by 87–98% by removing or replacing the main source of emission by a less emissive material and by increasing the air exchange rate to 1 h−1. In addition, an intercomparison of total emissions calculated from (1) PFS measurements and from (2) measured formaldehyde concentrations and air exchange rates indicate that an unidentified sink of formaldehyde may exist in indoor environments.

O ensino contemporâneo da arte e a hipótese de Bergala: diálogos e convergências

Este trabalho pretende estabelecer um diálogo entre o ensino da arte na contemporaneidade e a Hipótese-cinema de Alain Bergala, que propõe a inclusão do cinema como arte no espaço escolar. Constatamos a existência de pontos de convergência entre as propostas de ensino-aprendizagem da arte desenvolvidas no Brasil na atualidade e o plano elaborado pelo professor e cineasta para as escolas públicas francesas em 2001; e este artigo tece uma reflexão sobre esses aspectos, sob a luz do pensamento do cineasta Jean-Luc Godard, com o objetivo de imaginar novas proposições de arte dentro da escola, a partir da interação das duas propostas.

Freedom to Hold or Not to Hold Group Beliefs: The Case of Religious Beliefs in French and Polish Public School Textbooks

In French public schools, the project of teaching about religions is being made possible thanks to various recent ministerial reports and pedagogical reforms. The latter put an emphasis on positive liberty, because they contain the view that pupils should commit to a way of self-realization. On the contrary, Polish laws on textbooks put an emphasis on negative liberty. This article is an attempt to evaluate the advantages and limits of enhancing each of these kinds of liberty, as far as pupils' own freedom to believe or not to believe is concerned.

The Effects of Competition from Private Schooling on French Public School Districts in the Province of Québec

ABSTRACT The Province of Québec subsidizes nearly 50% of private education, and at the same time heavily regulates private schools. To date, no studies have been done to determine the effect of the unique nature of competition from K–12 private schools on public school education of the sort found in Québec. The authors used multiple regression to determine the effects of private school competition on school district performance and efficiency. The authors found that private school competition has a positive, though nonsignificant, effect on school district performance. However, private school competition does have a significant, positive effect on the efficiency of public school districts. This gain in efficiency is explained by competition's influence on lowering expenditures across the board.

Éléments pour une histoire de l’éducation à la citoyenneté : de l’école publique française au lycée, quels enjeux ?

L'éducation à la citoyenneté est à l'image de notre société, aux prises avec les fluctuations sociales, politiques et économiques du moment. De l'instruction civique et morale au service de l'État, au XIXe siècle, à l'individualisme démocratique de ces dernières années, la citoyenneté et son enseignement sont le reflet de tensions qui envahissent l'École. Après presque un siècle de stabilité, leur place et leurs enjeux en sont continuellement bouleversés. Cet article essaie de mettre en lumière quatre périodes qui ont marqué l’histoire de cette discipline, en s’appuyant sur les grandes conceptions et applications de l'éducation à la citoyenneté en milieu scolaire, dans sa complexité et son instabilité.

Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds ed. by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

et pour l’égalité) was established in 2004 to combat discrimination, it remains hostile to ethno-racial categorization, and complaints of discrimination against Blacks must be based on “national origin” rather than “race,” which does not exist as a category of discrimination for the HALDE. Marie Ndiaye, the author’s sister and the 2009 winner of the Prix Goncourt, provides an added bonus in her preface, “Les Sœurs,” a subtle parable on two mixed-race sisters and their reactions to discrimination in France. Pap Ndiaye will be dismissed by some opponents of action affirmative or of the gathering of statistics on Blacks merely because he is an américaniste. Nevertheless, La Condition noire demonstrates that France needs new and vigorous policies to deal with discrimination against Blacks and argues forcefully for Black Studies as a legitimate field of study in France. Davidson College (NC) Homer B. Sutton MUDIMBE-BOYI, ELISABETH, ed. Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7391-2135-1. Pp. 236. $70. As the old saying goes, the sun never set on the French empire, which, at its zenith, measured twenty times the size of metropolitan France (roughly the equivalent of the United States) and spanned the globe. A long and painful process of decolonization, involving costly wars of liberation in Indochina and Algeria, left France with just a handful of Départements et Territoires d’outre-mer (DOM-TOM). Relations between Paris and the former colonies have been mixed, to say the least, ranging from cordial to frosty and even downright hostile, and all the former colonies have struggled to find their way as independent states in their own right. Although it is true that France has continued to intervene militarily in several places, most notably in Africa, it is also true that France has tried hard to mend fences with its former colonies through such consortia as the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and thereby maintain a presence in what is sometimes called, nostalgically—according to its detractors—the Francophone world. The problem with such a Francocentric view is precisely that it perpetuates a de facto colonial power dynamic, as though it were still possible for France to continue to dictate Frenchness in plain denial of the indisputable fact that immigration to France has already redefined what it now means to be “French.” Today it has been established beyond any reasonable doubt that the French empire became, early on and almost by default (since the French were latecomers to the colonial empire-building game and had to rest content with scarcely inhabited desert areas with few natural resources), a question of national prestige rather than economic gain (with a few exceptions, such as Algeria and CochinChina ). Witness the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. This (post)colonial power dynamic is further reflected in the lexicological dichotomy between “French” and “Francophone.” This collection of essays from a 2006 conference held at Stanford University subverts this orthodox idea of Francophonie to examine it from the point of view of the cultural Other and explore ways in which the two terms “French” and “Francophone” can coexist and even enrich each other. Empire Lost consists of a dozen contributions by authorities in the field, including luminaries such as Assia Djebar and Michel Serres. The first part of the book looks at France today Reviews 183 as a “postempire mise en abyme within the hexagonal center” (xvii), changing its demographic landscape, awakening new sensibilities and cultural presences that are transforming France into a country of diversity and newness. Articles focus on laïcité in the French public school system; the growing visibility of Islam in France; the impetus provided by globalization for immigration to Europe; the growing irrelevance of formerly accepted terms, such as “Francophonie;” the appearance of néobarbarismes such as “Francographie” and “Françafriche,” which must be seen as an effort to somehow name the rise of new “multitudes” struggling to become “communities” (48); the African-Americanization of France, that is to say, the growing relevance of the African-American experience in France. Essays in the second part of the volume explore “new kinds of cross-cultural expressions in the arts, in...

Laïcité and multiculturalism: the Stasi Report in context1

French republican universalism--expressed most strongly in the principle and practice of laïcité--and multiculturalism have constituted opposite poles on questions of citizenship and integration. The report of the Stasi Commission on laïcité on 11 December 2003 and the following legislation on the donning of religious symbols in French public schools have once again, spurred debates over the meanings and practices of laïcité. The report and the law have been interpreted in different ways. Some have presented them as a reaffirmation of a historically constituted laïcité under new circumstances, others as a divergence from the real problems of racism, unemployment and gender inequality. In this article, I offer an alternative reading by supplementing a critical reading of the report with an analysis of its historical and immediate institutional context. I evaluate the Stasi Report in its immediate context of institutional change, and in the historical context of selected developments concerning laïcité since the 1905 law separating churches and State. I argue that the Stasi Report marks a fundamental break with French republican universalism, and I show that this break occurred contemporaneously with key gestures of multiculturalism: the establishment of the French Muslim Council and the creation of Muslim high schools under contract with the French state. This double movement to narrow the boundaries of laïcité, and for the state to expand the boundaries of identity-specific, Muslim public institutions and private schooling constitutes a reorganization of the public sphere in France which qualifies as a move towards multiculturalism.

French-Muslim Reactions to the Law Banning Religious Symbols in Schools: A Mixed Methods Analysis

This study is a mixed methods analysis of how French-Muslims respond to a French law banning the wearing of religious symbols in French public schools. In summer 2007, 356 French-Muslims were surveyed, and 20 of those Muslims were interviewed for this analysis. The statistical analysis reveals religiosity to be a significant predictor of French-Muslims’ negative sentiment toward la Loi 2004-228, the ban on the wearing of religious symbols in French public schools. In the interviews, French-Muslims express how they perceive la Loi 2004-228 as stifling Islamic religious identity and freedom, and leading to religious and political struggles in France. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the current situation in France represents a struggle over assimilation and how the issue of and controversy over Muslim immigration has spread throughout the European Union.