Introduction

French public school was first established contrary to territories, or at least contrary to territorial identities. The desire to create a school for all resulted in the plan to establish the same school everywhere, because this alone could convey the values of the French Republic as well as national feeling. As pointed out by Prost [PRO 92, p. 63]: “One of the functions of primary school was to contribute to the unification of minds. Henceforth, the particularities (“dialects” for example) had to be eradicated: the common reference of all students had to solely be the national framework, both for the study of language as well as for history (“French civilization” in old textbooks) or geography (which taught the “natural boundaries” of the territory). By setting up the predominant primary school system known as “people’s school”, the conditions for decontextualization or “uprooting” were realized, which was to facilitate integration into the national community: “following the Revolution, the French model claimed to be a unified political body, and was developing the territory in a centralizing way, asserting the primacy of the capital and authorities residing there; the primordial, if not unique, sense of belonging to the “nation” being inculcated in education” [BER 05, p. 11]. At the same time, however, education was given the mission of participating in the “methodical socialization of the younger generation”, in other words, developing in the child “a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states, which are demanded of him/her by both the political society as a whole and the special milieu for which he/she is specifically designed” ([DUR 03 & 51], 1st ed., 1922), which implies adaptation to the socioeconomic context, including its territorial dimension. The issue of the relationship between school (in the generic sense of the term) and its territory was therefore posited from the outset, and from the end of the 19th Century it formed a central aspect of education policies, which would attempt (most of the time without success) to reconcile two imperatives: one of political nature, that of the national unity of public schools, and the other socioeconomic in nature, including the adaptation of education to local conditions to promote local development and the participation of school education to the modernization of the economy.

To these objectives would be added, after 1960, the taking into account of the inequalities of education and academic success. Alongside the socioeconomic and cultural determinants of these inequalities, the analyses of which were carried out by the sociology of education (Bernstein, Bourdieu and Passeron, Baudelot and Establet), works which were often sponsored or financed by public authorities (those of INED¹ or DEP² for example) highlighted the consequences of the territorial distribution of educational provision on trajectories and academic performances. Progressively, the extension of the education system vertically (extension of study period) and horizontally (diversification of educational programs), the widening of access to studies and the (relative) democratization of access to diplomas [BAU 89, DUR 02] as well as the emergence of a more utilitarian conception of education [TAN 86] based on the “competency model” (and not just on that of “knowledge”), changed the relationship between the school and its territory.

At the same time, the territories involved in the increased competitiveness dynamics linked to the comparative advantages between areas witnessed a strengthening of the assertion of the need for a return to the local system and an identity demarcation. The rise of local assertions and regional languages, the typicity of terroirs and heritages, the multiplication of quality labels, etc., were increasingly found, directly or indirectly, in schools and education in the broad sense.

It was from the 1980s that education science started to focus on the concept of territory and, more broadly, on the territorial contexts of education. First, it was the spatial dimension resulting from the work of geographers that served as a framework for a number of territorialized education analyses [GUM 80], continued today within the framework of studies on spatial inequalities [CAR 14] or the Observatoire de l'école rural (Rural School Observatory) – Observatoire education et territories (Education and Territory Obsevatory) [ALP 01]. Then, in the 1990s, emphasis was successively placed on territorialized education policies, educational territory planning policies [DER 92, CHA 94, VAN 01], on the “effects” such as “master effect”, “class effect”, “establishment effect”, “circumscription effect” [DUR 88, BRE 94] and finally in the 2000s on territory effects [CHA 13]. Just before this last period, the Evaluation and Long-Term Planning Department (DEP) of the French Ministry of Education [DAV 98] highlighted (which was a surprise to many) the right level of success of students of the schools in rural areas, which was confirmed, in particular, by all the works of the Rural School Observatory [ALP 01].

On another level, at the end of the 1980s, the territory appeared as a pedagogical as well as didactic opportunity that facilitated learning and developed students’ motivation. Many pedagogical movements (following, in particular, the Freinet school) claimed this stance, which was usually accompanied by great attention given to local relations (with local elected representatives, association movement, etc.). Later, it generally constituted the subject of innovative educational practices, such as “learning territory” [JAM 11] or the “educating village” [FEU 02].

At the same time, since the 1990s, with the emergence of environmental education, followed by education for sustainable development and heritage education, there seemed to be an emerging link between education and territories. The rise of education à, “education for”, in National Education, the emergence of a field of research structured around this theme, such as continuity beyond explicit incentives included in the Rocard law of 1985 within agricultural education, of a strong link between the institutions and territories, contributed to making them education “actors” in the sense that they impacted on school and university curricula [BAR 12]. But “education for” can also take a utilitarian function in projects of economic valuation of territories, hence raising the issue of legitimacy and ethics [BAR 13].

The primary objective of this summative book on the topic “Education and Territories” is to re-examine the school combination, understood in the broad sense (in France: school, junior high and high school³), and territory, according to three key aspects and fundamental questions which underlie its internal organization:

– the first part of the book focuses on historical developments, with a specific focus on the current situation, of the various links that have gradually developed between education and its territory. The contributions that make up this first part attempt to identify and characterize the relationship between the school and its territory, which has been established over a long period of time. Beyond that, the contributors attempt to specify the contemporary modalities within this framework that are of key significance to emerging innovations. They thus question old institutional arrangements (school projects, for example) as new (educational projects in territories, for example), as well as original and innovative forms recently adopted by education in relation to its territories (“learning territories”, “educating villages”, etc.) and new curricular arrangements such as “education for” (for example education for sustainable development);
– Part 2 covers the role of territories in education and their effects on education in terms of the pedagogical and didactic innovations that have developed. In this context, it asks whether and how the territory, in terms of learning, can be included in the strict discipline (geography, in particular), in the multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary area (sustainable development, environmental education, for example) and in educational partnership projects. It also addresses in this respect the question of the place currently occupied by the territorial system, which gives meaning to professorial activity, in the construction of the professional identity of teachers and, beyond that, the possible necessity introducing the territorial dimension in their initial training;
– finally, the third part deals with the findings and analyses resulting from field research, including aspects of the topic of more theoretical education and territories, by mobilizing its operational concepts. It thus poses various successive questions for this purpose. To what extent and through which processes do territories and territorialities weigh on education? Are “territory effects” at work to this end? More precisely, are some of the observed inequalities in education and orientation of territorial origin? Do the public policies carried out really correspond to the needs of education in the territories? Are the rural educational characteristics observed in the past still relevant today, or are the rural and urban schools converging?

All of these questions are based on numerous field studies carried out in multiple laboratories (ADEF, ECP, EDUTER, ESO, GEODE, Géographie-cité, LDAR, LIPHA, LIRDEF, LSE, etc.) within French and Canadian universities, as reflected by the various signatories to the chapters. These questions are also fueled by the scientific work carried out in the last 20 years on these topics, by, among others, the Education and Territories Observatory and its Spanish Iberian partners (universities of Barcelona, Granada and Saragossa in particular) and Portuguese partners (University of Lisbon) [CHA 14]. The question and development of the main concepts used in this summary book owe much to this work based on field surveys [LE 01].

Through the diversity of these approaches (and the quality of the work gathered here), a central issue arises at the theoretical level: the issue of the constitution of a field of research structured around multiple and complex relations between education and territories. Although it may seem difficult to highlight a thematic unit, it is however possible to bring out the main aspects, which pool recent research together:

– that of the territorial inequalities of education, probably the oldest in the field of university research constituted around its initial sociological dimension, subsequently supplemented by more geographical concepts (different types of spatial segmentation, territoriality, etc.), a field which is increasingly recognized as such;
– that of the consequences of the territorial context on the contents of education, in close connection with the development of “education for” (EDD, ERE, heritage education, etc.), which refers to a long tradition of the primary school (the “object lesson”, the Freinet school, etc.), whose main theoretical dimensions fall within the fields of pedagogy, didactics and (partially and, without doubt, inadequately to date) the epistemology of scholastic knowledge;
– that of the so-called “territorialized” educational policy, a well-identified research subject inspired by the contributions of political science, and also by the sociology of organizations, which could include more widely than today, not only more global issues (effects of globalization on education and territories), but also more “local” issues, which do not belong to the usual register of “educational policies” such as that of proximity networks of all kinds that can help to “circumvent” public decision, the consequences of urbanistic conceptions (settlement patterns, etc.), or conflicts in the use of typical territories, for example of “new rural communities”.

Beyond these key questions, such a field of research would have everything to gain by developing scientific cooperation around the issue of social representations [BAR 16], which covers all of the topics addressed here, including territorial (we are thinking here of territoriality), and which has the merit of possessing methodologies likely to be shared by many researchers, as evidenced by the contributions of some authors present here. The construction of this field of research, which is already well under way but undoubtedly still little formalized today, is an enormous challenge for education science, often questioned by the actors and decision makers on these issues. The aim of this book is to modestly contribute to the achievement of this objective.

Bibliography

[BAR 13] BARTHES A., ALPE Y., “De la question socialement vive à l’objet d’enseignement: comment légitimer des savoirs incertains ?”, Les Dossiers des sciences de l’éducation, no. 29, 2013.

[BAR 16] BARTHES A., ALPE Y., Utiliser les représentations sociales en éducation, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2016.

[BAU 89] BAUDELOT C., ESTABLET R., Le niveau monte: réfutation d’une vieille idée concernant la prétendue décadence de nos écoles, Le Seuil, Paris, 1989.

[BÉR 05] BÉRARD L., CEGARRA M., DJAMA M. et al., Biodiversité et savoirs naturalistes locaux en France, INRA, 2005.

[BRE 94] BRESSOUX P., “Les recherches sur les effets-écoles et les effets-maîtres”, Revue Française de Pédagogie, vol. 108, pp. 91–137, 1994.

[CAR 14] CARO P., BOUDESSEUL G., GRELET Y. et al., Atlas académique des risques sociaux d’échec scolaire: l’exemple du décrochage, Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, Céreq, 2014.

[CHA 94] CHARLOT B., L’école et le territoire: nouveaux espaces, nouveaux enjeux, A. Colin, Paris, 1994.

[CHA 13] CHAMPOLLION P., Les inégalités d’éducation et d’orientation d’origine territoriale, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2013.

[CHA 14] CHAMPOLLION P., BARTHES A. (eds), L’école rurale et montagnarde en contexte nord méditerranéen. Approches socio-spatiales, Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, Besançon, 2014.

[DAV 98] DAVAILLON A., OEUVRARD F., “Réussit-on à l’école rurale ?”, Cahiers Pédagogiques, vol. 365, pp. 33–35, 1998.

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[DUR 22] DURKHEIM E., Éducation et sociologie, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1922.

[DUR 88] DURU-BELLAT M., MINGAT A., “Le déroulement de la scolarité au collège: le contexte ‘fait des différences’”, Revue Française de Sociologie, no. 29, pp. 649–666, 1988.

[DUR 02] DURU-BELLAT M., Les inégalités sociales à l’école: genèse et mythes, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2002.

[FEU 02] FEU J., SOLER J., “Més enllà de l’escola rural: cap a un model integral i integrador de l’educació en el territori”, Temps d’Educació, vol. 26, pp. 133–156, 2002.

[GUM 80] GUMUCHIAN H., MÉRIAUDEAU R., “L’enfant montagnard… Son avenir?”, Revue de Géographie Alpine, Special edition, Isère committee for UNICEF, Grenoble, 1980.

[JAM 01] JAMBES J.-P., Territoires apprenants. Esquisses pour le développement local du XXIème siècle, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2001.

[LE 01] LE MAREC J., Ce que le “terrain” fait aux concepts, HDR, Université Paris-7, 2001.

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[TAN 86] TANGUY L. (ed.), L’introuvable relation formation-emploi: un état des recherches en France, La Documentation française, Paris, 1986.

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PART 1
Historical Developments and Contemporary Modalities of Interactions between Education and Territories

Introduction to Part 1

The various contributions that constitute this first part all attempt to characterize, from their historical roots, the complexity of the relations that have gradually been built between education and its territory. The idea is to clarify the various modalities that they are currently adopting by further specifying the long historical framework on which they are based, and then focusing on the recent multiple factors of their developments.

Bruno Garnier first of all posits a historical perspective on the whole by raising the question of the purposes of socialization of education and that of the relationship between the construction of individual identity and the belonging of each person to collective identities registered in the territories of students’ life or origin. He then endeavors to provide a detailed analysis of the expectations and objectives of public educational policies that have followed one another over the past two centuries. Developed recently to build and unify Republican France beyond local peculiarities and regional identities, today they increasingly integrate, in what resembles a pendulum swing, the territorial dimension. The author ends up wondering, ultimately, if an aggiornamento could not be sketched between these two apparently contradictory, or at least diametrically opposed, political positions.

The other chapters of part 1 all show a particular dimension of recent developments, often of a somewhat managerial tendency, all of which seriously raise the issue of integration of territories in education issues. Thus, moving from the macrolevel to the mesolevel, Alain Bouvier, Michel Boyer, Thierry Eymard and Laurent Rieutort distinguish, in the progressive development initiated in the 1990s, partnership managerial practices among the heads of local public educational institutions (EPLE created in 1985), new tools for managing interactions between education and territories. They note that these professional practices are increasingly observed in territorial school networks that are part of a co-construction partnership process. This brings us to the work of Maryvonne Dussaux, who explicitly shows that the partnership projects that are now multiplying within the field of education and training, provide de facto frameworks for the development of “learning territories” based on a collective cooperative approach supported by potential territorial assets that they have.

The issue of “education for”, more specifically education for sustainable development and its links with the territories, is subsequently introduced by Jean-Marc Lange and then Christian Peltier, one for general education and the other for agricultural education. Jean-Marc Lange shows, through an in-depth analysis of educational partnership projects, which are increasingly frequent and widely implemented within the framework of education for sustainable development, that school in the broadest sense (school, junior high and high school), as an institution where the threads of citizenship are tied, is gradually developing into the center of a territory that has become, or has become again, a learner.

Chapter 5 discusses a new age of relations between education and territories. The author indicates that after the time of project-based learning, there is situation-based learning, tied around an integrative territorialized object. This tendency is becoming more and more evident today, particularly in agricultural education, which a long time ago, as recalled, developed close ties with the territories (see at the institutional level, the Rocard law of 1985).

Finally, as in each part of the book, a case study provides a specific complement to the overall reflections. Valérie Guillemot then shows, through the case of the Regional Center for Vocational Training on Bioconstruction of the Southern Alps, that the professional field and institutional control are factors that influence behaviors and collective action. She identifies in the original professional practices of this training center, based on local contexts, the main levers likely to prevent inequalities of education and the orientation of territorial origin in the training of adults.