Around the concept of “school culture”: the contribution of historians of education to the epistemological debate

Abstract

The article reflects on the epistemological contribution offered by historians of education to the definition of the concept of “school culture”. This concept, understood as the set of contents, gestures and representations of knowledge elaborated at schools over centuries, concerns not so much the structuring configuration that characterises the social relations in the classroom, as in the notion of “school form” developed in sociology, but rather the daily actions of teachers and pupils oriented towards declared or unspoken, conscious or unconscious goals, partly linked to what Yves Chevallard described in the final stages of the process of “didactic transposition”.

Specified in the context of increased interest in the evolution and redefinition over time of the curriculum and teaching subjects, the concept has thus made it possible to review the role and mission of the school, no longer as a mere transmitter of knowledge elaborated elsewhere and gradually betrayed, but as a elaborator of its own culture, “teachable” in fact, with its own rules, values and practices.

In light of a well-established tradition of studies inaugurated by the fundamental works of Ivor Goodson for the Anglo-Saxon world and André Chervel for France, this article will reason, among other things, on the constructs of “device”, “practice”, “discipline”, “educations”, which historians of education have gradually identified and reworked, also on the basis of different lines of research, with the aim of showing the transversal nature, yet always contextual and situated, of the school phenomenon.