L’école Gulliver and La Borde: An ethnographic account of collectivist integration and institutional psychotherapy

ABSTRACT

This article draws on ethnographic research at L’école Gulliver, a preschool in Paris that integrates children with disabilities in mainstream classrooms with non-disabled peers. The preschool provides a case example of a collectivist integration approach to constructing shared institutional life, which is conceptualized in part through their connection to the work of Felix Guattari with psychiatric patients at a French in-patient clinic, La Borde. At both La Borde and Gulliver, daily life and institutional practices are structured to maximize transversality, with the intention of fostering a new kind of “group-subject” that is responsive to the realities of daily institutional life. We argue that practices at Gulliver challenge progressive inclusive teaching practices that largely ignore or neglect to account for the emotional difficulties of inclusion. Their approach challenges the focus in progressive inclusive education on the individual child or educator to the detriment of understanding the power of the collective production of subjectivities. At Gulliver, the experience of disability is a shared reference point across the group, and although it is experienced differently for different individuals, it is central to the construction of a group-subject that, in being more expansive and responsible than any individual, is to the benefit of all.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• curriculum studies
• inclusive education
• socio-political conditions
• pedagogical orientations
• Guattari

Acknowledgments

We wish to express our gratitude to Cécile Herrou, Ghada Ouba, Mélanie, Aurélia, Stephanie and the children and parents at L'école Gulliver. We are grateful to Annick de Moncuit, who arranged our visit to La Borde, and to the staff and boarders who welcomed us so warmly. Thanks to our volunteer camera crew, Gina Gonnella, Jessica Harmon, and Alex Collopy. And most especially, thanks to Adeline Lebeaux Aileo, our translator, guide, and video editor.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial interest or benefit arising from the direct application of our research.

Notes

1. This stands in distinction from the dominant goals of French preschools, which are understood as functioning to transform the child into the student through the teacher leading the children's enculturation into the rules norms of a common identity. According to Brougère et al. (2008), the teacher is distanced from the children as these rules and norms come from the national curriculum and cultural expectations and are enforced through school inspectors. Likewise, Brougère et al. note that the initiative of the child is barely visible.

2. Due to differences in education and licensing requirements, the adults caring for the children at the A.P.A.T.E. schools are not called teachers. Rather, those without formal early childhood training are called assistants and those with 0- to 6-year-old training are éducatrices or educators. Those who are trained for national education with 3- to 12-year olds are called teachers. In this article, we do not distinguish between assistants and educators at Gulliver but refer to all of the non-administrative staff as educators.

3. In their development of Institutional Psychotherapy, Oury and Guattari were both heavily the influenced by Lacan but they also had a sharp break from Lacan as they conceptualized how to work in institutional settings and with patients that Lacan understood as unanalyzable. For more on Guattari's famous rejection of Lacan, see Dosse (2010) and Guattari (2015).

4. For instance, in the case of the USA, see Boldt & Valente (2014) or Valente & Collins’ (2016) discussion of the harmful and disabling effects of special education teaching practices as reported by the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, where students with disabilities, particularly minority students, are put into secluded settings, physically and mechanically restrained, suspended and expelled, and arrested at alarmingly higher rates in comparison to white, able-bodied peers.

5. For a fuller discussion of integration vs. inclusion in international inclusive education contexts, see Mitchell (2005) and Rieser (2012).

6. La Borde residents are called “boarders.” Words like “patient” and “client” are avoided (De Bisschop, 2009). Herein, we use “patient” when referring to those in psychiatric care in general and “boarders” specifically for those at La Borde.

7. We have not yet completed our interviews. Our next step is to show the film to and interview educators, administrators and parents of children in other French preschools, in order to develop a comparative, ethnographic perspective on inclusive education settings that attend to both pedagogic and psychotherapeutic aspects of education for children with disabilities.

8. Differences between Oury's Institutional Psychotherapy and Lacanian practices of psychoanalysis revolve around the centrality of the group as an agent of transformation and the ways that transference and interpretation are conceptualized and worked with. For more on this, see Dosse (2010) and Guattari (1995, 2015).

9. In 2005, French legislation mandated the right of children with disabilities go to school. Before 2005, children with disabilities in France did not go to school if they were deemed too disabled to benefit. Between the 2005 passage and 2010, there was a 30% increase in students with disabilities being served by the Ministry of National Education. Currently the Ministry serves over 180,000 students with disabilities either in local schools or specialized schools. The 2005 law represents an attempt to shift over the responsibility for educating students with disabilities to the Ministry of National Education as opposed to the assortment of ministries working on health, labor, sports, and justice issues that were responsible before. The governing of education for students with disabilities is effectively no longer separate from the governance of students in the general population (Meijer, 2012). Before the 2005, A.P.A.T.E. was notable for being the first to accept children with disabilities without regard for the nature or severity of the disability.

10. Not all of the older children participate in this. For example, we observed one of the four-year olds who spent this time doing games with much younger children. This child has been diagnosed with severe intellectual disability and her parent and treatment team do not anticipate that she will go on to an academic environment.

11. Although there is not space to explore it here, in our interviews with the administrators, educators and parents, the experience of mattering was repeatedly cited as central to parents’ experience of L’école Gulliver.

12. For more on the work of the French pedagogue Ferdnand Deligny, see Author1 & Author2, 2014.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by a grant from The Social Science Research Institute at The Pennsylvania State University.

Notes on contributors

Gail Boldt

Gail Boldt is a professor in Curriculum and Instruction at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests are in the sociopolitical landscape of early childhood and elementary education, and in disability studies, literacy studies and Deleuzo-Guattarian and psychoanalytic theories. She is also a practicing psychodynamic psychotherapist.

Joseph Michael Valente

Joseph Michael Valente is an assistant professor in Curriculum and Instruction at Pennsylvania State University. He is an educational anthropologist working across early childhood education and disability studies. His research focuses on early childhood school settings as sites of socialization for deaf children and children with disabilities.