Negotiating curriculum change in the French university: the case of ‘regionalising’ social scientific knowledge

Abstract

This paper focuses on the curricular change in French universities that has taken place over the last two decades and especially since the implementation of the LMD Reform in 2002. Curricula tend to become ‘regionalised‐knowledge’ courses, by regrouping disciplinary knowledge and looking forward to economic and social needs. The article aims at analysing the process of producing this change. The first proposition is to show that change is not a linear process, but an ongoing process of negotiation undertaken by a wide range of institutions, social groups and agents, who operate in different institutional levels (European‐level, State‐level, university/local‐level or pedagogic/local‐level). The second proposition is that these negotiation procedures mask the differences in the social basis of each one of these discourses and, thus, mask conflict and struggle over social control in higher education reforms.

Keywords:

• curriculum change
• French university
• regionalised knowledge
• pedagogic discourse

Acknowledgements

The research for this work is funded by a doctoral studentship from the French Regional Council of Provence‐Alpes‐Côte d’Azur and supported by the Rectorate of the Academy of Aix‐Marseille.

Notes

1. Research work presented in this paper is part of a PhD thesis, in progress.

2. Qualitative data, official documents and interviews with institutional agents were collected within the period of 2006–2008. Interview quotes figuring in this paper, unless otherwise stated, are from interviews with the author conducted in this period; the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement.

3. I suggest that there is no single curriculum model that encompasses regionalisation of social sciences, but rather four different types of ‘regions of knowledge’. They can be identified by two fundamental criteria: (1) whether the course is inside or outside disciplinary institutional space (a pluridisciplinary course within a disciplinary department or an autonomous pluridisciplinary course outside disciplinary departments); and (2) whether the course is thematic‐centred or professional competence‐centred (the first refers to subject or question thematised by a range of disciplines whilst the second refers to specialization in specific competences, of an occupation). Each one of these types presupposes a different curriculum structure and different principles of recontextualising knowledge.

4. Research was carried in two French universities during the period of 2006–2008. The analysis is focused on courses of masters’ degree, elaborated after the implementation of the LMD Reform and declared as non‐disciplinary courses: ‘Mediation and cultural engineering’, ‘Urbanism studies and local development’, ‘Ergology’, and ‘Public action and social expertise’. It draws on official documents of the program of study (contents, teaching hours, evaluation modalities) and on interviews with heads of studies and academic staff for each course, concerning curriculum designing and pedagogic practices.

5. It is worth highlighting that the concepts of ‘positional’ and ‘relational autonomy’ elaborated by Maton (2005) enable us in this research to go beyond the limits of Bernstein’s concept of ‘regionalisation’. As I have illustrated in this paper, ‘regionalisation’ is an interesting descriptive concept for what is currently changing within higher education’s curricula, especially in French universities. This is regarding displacing boundaries and regionalising disciplinary knowledge within pedagogic texts. However, ‘regionalisation’ is a historically contextualised concept. The universal concepts are those of ‘classification’ and ‘framing’ within the activity of recontextualising knowledge, which enable the analytical connection between micro and macro levels. From this perspective, ‘relational autonomy’ is also universal as it interrogates the relations between autonomous (internal to a field) and heteronomous (external to the field) principles structuring this activity. It is a change within these relations that explains the ‘regionalisation of knowledge’: the weakening of the ‘relational autonomy’ of agents within the field of higher education.