Formal and Non-Formal Education: Where Do They Overlap?
Research Seminar
Faculty of Education, 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, outreach coordinators from institutions and associations involved in science education for sustainable development, and researchers in education and communication.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019, 2:00–5:00 p.m.
Jean-Marc LANGE, Professor, LIRDEF, FDE, University of Montpellier
“Education for …”: The Opportunity to Bridge Formal and Non-Formal Education vs. the Risk of Blurring the Lines Between Knowledge and Social Disintegration
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 engage with the changes underway, so as to enable people, in all their cultural and geopolitical diversity, to address and overcome 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, as everything depends on the chosen objectives and the pedagogical models employed.
If we uphold the principle of a commitment based on the free expression of individual and collective choices, we must then reflect on the conditions that make an emancipatory project possible. Four curricular guidelines therefore seem necessary to us for this purpose: to conceive of choice in terms of real freedom rather than purely formal freedom; to conceive of the School as an “empowering environment”; to address 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 speaking the truth; politicize these issues and the knowledge associated with them by conceiving them not as objective data but in terms of their relationship to power, through non-formal problematization practices that foster openness to the spaces of others.