Formal and Nonformal Education: What Are the Intersections?
Research Seminar
Faculty of Education atthe University of Montpellier (Building A, room indicated at the building entrance), broadcast via videoconference tothe ENS in Lyon(Room D2 012 – Descartes – Debourg Metro Station)
Options for attending the seminar remotely.
Contacts:
Session 3
A seminar for students, teachers, facilitators from institutions and scientific associations involved in education for sustainable development, and researchers in education and communication.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019, 2:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.
Jean-Marc LANGE, University Professor, LIRDEF, FDE, University of Montpellier
"Education for ...": The Opportunity to Link Formal and Nonformal Education Versus the Risk of Indifferentiation of Knowledge and Anomie
Abstract
The contemporary world’s entry into the Anthropocene—as a global civilizational event, without waiting for its scientific recognition as such—requires the education sector to participate in the changes underway so as to enable diverse audiences, in all their cultural and geopolitical diversity, to acknowledge and address the resulting challenges. This is precisely what UNESCO’s “Education 2030” roadmap (2017) urges us to do. In the French-speaking world, these educational changes take the form of “education for,” a diverse set of educational pathways aimed at engaging young people and developing transferable skills (UNESCO, 2015) with a view to sustainability. However, these educational approaches are not, in and of themselves, the source of a virtuous transformation of the school system in the service of an equally virtuous societal transformation, for everything depends on the chosen objectives and the pedagogical models employed.
If we embrace the principle of a commitment based on the free expression of individual and collective choices, then we must reflect on the conditions necessary for an emancipatory project. Four curricular guidelines seem necessary to us for this purpose: to conceive of choice in terms of real freedom rather than purely formal freedom; to view the school as an “empowering environment”; to consider societal challenges as issues, from a critical perspective by (re)examining them—yet within a context of unstable knowledge, ambiguous problems, and the difficulty of stating the truth; politicize these issues and the knowledge associated with them by conceiving of them not as objective facts but in terms of their relationship to power, through non-formal problematization practices that foster openness to the spaces of others.