Today, Monday May 6, it’s off day at the INSPE (Higher National Institute of Teaching and Education). Trainers are mobilizing to oppose the reform of teaching and teacher training competitions. Across the country, motions are adopted and actions organized. In Paris, two conferences with researcher Xavier Pons and researcher Anne-Anne Chartier will shed light on the issues of teacher training from 11 a.m. In Carcassonne, the mobilized personnel wrote this article. They share their concerns with the readers of the Educational Café.
We, staff of the Faculty of Education at the Carcassonne site, in Aude, united as a collective, wish to express our deep dissatisfaction and our deep concern following the announcements of reform of recruitment competitions and the training of future school teachers of our children. This reform, poorly prepared, would be imposed by means of media announcement, without consultation of the main stakeholders, with the greatest contempt for the students who would suffer from the untenable timetable. This reform should, moreover, apply as if by magic, from the start of the school year, for a competition pulled out of the hat in spring 2025. We refuse this forced passage.
We carry out this training of school teachers with conviction and commitment on a daily basis. We have expertise in this area that no one has deemed useful to rely on to carry out and apply a reform of which we know neither the ins and outs, nor even the contents. Is there by chance a written text that we have missed? Anything other than comments made during a visit to a school broadcast on television? Nobody knows.
This mystery training, moreover, we will soon no longer be able to carry out in our territories, as the reform planned in the state threatens the survival of training establishments in modest towns, like ours, that of Carcassonne. However, we know how essential this presence of higher education in the heart of rural areas is, especially for young people whose financial means are insufficient to study far from where they live.
But let’s think, let’s not be obtuse and study the project a little: before integrating the miracle solution of a 21st century normal school, the student will be able, we are told, to integrate a new license preparing for the profession. In our University, that of Montpellier, and on our site, that of Carcassonne, this license already exists. It seems that no one cares. No. Instead of licenses already created by the Universities of France, which have proven qualities, which benefit from official accreditations, and which, strangely, no one wanted to evaluate before reforming the whole thing, in place of that , therefore, a new specific license is created. Very good. Would you like to register? Impossible, it doesn’t exist. Who will create it? no idea. So pull the rabbit out of the hat.
We are angry. We are committed, every day, to preparing our students for success in competitive exams and supporting their first steps in a profession which we know how difficult the challenges of the contemporary world make it. This competition is modified in large widths. What information do we have, only four months before its implementation? Little better than an empty shell, unofficial in addition, essentially evoking durations of ordeal. From a poor skeleton of projects for new programs, in French and mathematics. And, miraculously, a slideshow that accidentally leaked. Still the story of the rabbit and the hat.
In light of these fragments, what can we say? What do we expect from future public school teachers in charge of our children? of your children? Let them fill, as best they can, the cruel lack of qualified personnel, increasingly difficult to hide, especially in forgotten places, suburbs and other rural areas, including us.
However, let us recognize it, this reform of teaching competitions and, by extension of the training of students who still have the courage and the will to believe in our profession, has the merit of returning to a previous reform, the last in date, at which many teachers, trainers and education professionals were also opposed, both in rectorates and in universities. How do we analyze this failure? We don’t analyze it. We go back, we don’t learn from our mistakes, we continue, quickly, at full speed, communication doesn’t wait.
However, if we are not opposed to moving the competition to the end of the third year of the license, we categorically refuse the untenable timetable which would force our students to carry out a third year of study at full speed during which they would have six months barely able to prepare as best they can for tests whose contents are still not known to this day and whose requirements are more than vague. We lack teachers? Never mind, let’s recruit them earlier, lure them with a donation and the problem will be, as if by magic, solved. But rabbits, we insist, do not come out of hats. Trying to plug the gap in insufficient recruitment, always in the short term, by forcing the entire system and its actors to an untenable timing, seems to us to be somewhat counterproductive and incidentally lacking in intelligence, if at all. is an important quality in education.
If someone were to ask the question to a trainer, whose job is teaching and training, what would she say, what would he say?
Probably one of the strong points of current teacher training is the possibility for students to compare the knowledge resulting from research in didactics of disciplines, in educational sciences and child psychology with the varied practices of experienced teachers in the field, and to create, step by step, a truly professional, efficient and coherent path. Clear ? The role of universities, that of rectorates, are not opposed but complementary and both essential.
Young teachers need to develop themselves to achieve success and ensure the development of the students in their charge. To do this, they need field expertise and good practices as much as reflection on their action, made possible by access to university research. An idea that the designers of reforms would also do well to think about.
School is not the place for the short term or for media announcements. It doesn’t have to be used that way. We must defend public schools. Teachers must be properly trained.
For this reason, we will participate, against the announced reform, at the mobilization day of the INSPE of France, on Monday May 6, 2024.
