Qu’est-ce qu’une « bonne pratique » ? Raison pédagogique et rapport à l’efficacité chez les futurs enseignants

Abstract

Educational research can claim to be able to establish the efficiency of teaching practice. One way to achieve this may require a conceptual enlargement of the field of educational work practices. For example by questioning the way practitioners judge their own work efficiency and consider the part research can play (or not) in order to increase their power to act. We thus tried to answer the following research question: How do (future) primary teachers deem “good”, and more specifically, “effective” practice? A hundred students of Geneva University were asked to resolve a problem which recurrently occurs during school work organisation and planning. The results - obtained by categorization of the obtained answers - show that teachers claim to base their bounded rationality on two main, interdependent aspects. First, some practical proposals: beginner teachers’ intentions tend (1) to restore collective work, (2) to distribute and differentiate activities, (3) to outsource its regulation. Second, the criteria of justification of the highlighted proposals are related to two dominating concerns: (1) didactic relevance of action and (2) unanimous ethic of integration. Finally we note – and assume – that practitioners value pragmatism - as much as in daily life they experience it as a kind of thwarted idealism.

Keywords

• Teaching practice
• Work organization
• Bounded rationality
• Efficiency
• Pragmatism