Abstract
Ethnography permits a renewal of interpretive frameworks as they have been defined and fixed at any given moment by a dominant ideology that saturates both public debate and the scientific community. Ethnography can change the conventional way of explaining some social situations or issues. It holds this power because it puts researchers in touch with the lived world of actors. In other words, provided that researchers are ready and willing to question their pre-established views, they find themselves facing a complex, ambivalent, multiple, partly indeterminate and shifting reality. Conventional interpretive frameworks therefore seem to them inadequate, reductionist, simplistic. The ethnographic experience challenges researchers to refresh their tools for describing and understanding, and that is what this chapter would like to illustrate through the author’s research works on disadvantaged urban schools in France and in South Africa.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Conseillère d’éducation, a woman who fell within the academic rather than social work category, but did not teach and did not necessarily participate in the class councils mentioned later.
- 2.
In France, a “conseil de classe” is a meeting in which teachers, in the presence of and under the authority of the principal, share their evaluations of each pupil in their class and make decisions about future placement. Student representatives and elected parents are present.
References
Baudelot, C., & Establet, R. (1971). L'école capitaliste en France. Paris: Maspero.
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders. Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free Press.
Becker, H. S. (1983). Studying urban schools. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 14–2, 99–108.
Becker, H. S. (1998). Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you’re doing it. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Bourdieu, P. (1966). L'école conservatrice. Les inégalités devant l'école et devant la culture. Revue française de sociologie, VII, 25–347.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1970). La reproduction. Paris: Minuit.
Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., & de Saint-Martin, M. (1965). Rapport pédagogique et communication. Paris: Mouton.
Debarbieux, E. (1996). La Violence en milieu scolaire. Paris: ESF.
Durkheim, E. (1968). Éducation et sociologie. Paris: PUF.
Felouzis, G., Liot, F., & Perroton, J. (2005). L’apartheid scolaire. Enquête sur la ségrégation ethnique dans les collèges. Paris: Le Seuil.
Franchi, V. (Ed.). (2003). Intercultural relations across the racialised divide: Current perspectives on race, racism and intercultural relations in post-apartheid South Africa (theme issue). International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 27(2).
Franchi, V. (2004). Pratiques de discrimination et vécu de la violence des professionnels en contexte ethnicisé. VEI Enjeux, 137, 22–31.
Franchi, V., & Payet, J.-P. (2010). “Vu d'en bas”. La transformation de l'école sud-africaine, à l'aune des expériences subjectives. Raisons Educatives, 14, 221–248.
Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Chicago/London: Aldine/Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Goffman, E. (1972). The presentation of self in everyday life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Review, 48(1), 1–17.
H.C.I. (1998). Lutte contre les discriminations. Faire respecter le principe d’égalité. Paris: La Documentation française.
Hannerz, U. (1980). Exploring the city. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hébrard, J. (2002). La mixité sociale à l’école et au collège. Paris: La Documentation française.
Henry-Lorcerie, F. (1986). Éducation interculturelle et changement institutionnel: l’expérience française. Sociologie du Sud-Est, 49–50, 103–126.
Hughes, E. (1971). The sociological eye: Selected papers. Chicago: Aldine.
Lepoutre, D. (1997). Coeur de banlieue. Codes, rites et langages. Paris: O. Jacob.
Lorcerie, F. (1996). Laïcité 1996. La République à l’école de l’immigration? Revue Française de Pédagogie, 117, 53–85.
Lynch, K., & Payet, J.-P. (2011). L’égalité en éducation: Redistribution, reconnaissance, représentation et relations affectives. Education et sociétés, 27, 5–22.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. New York: Free Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1995). Emotions and women’s capabilities. In M. Nussbaum & J. Glover (Eds.), Women, culture and development: A study of human capabilities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Payet, J.-P. (1985). L’insolence. Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, 27, 49–55.
Payet, J.-P. (1992). Ce que disent les mauvais élèves. Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, 54, 84–93.
Payet, J.-P. (1995). Collèges de banlieue. Ethnographie d’un monde scolaire. Paris: Armand Colin.
Payet, J.-P. (1997). Le “sale boulot”. Division morale du travail dans un collège en banlieue. Les Annales de la recherche urbaine, 75, 19–31.
Payet, J.-P. (2002). The paradox of ethnicity in French secondary schools. In L. Roulleau-Berger (Ed.), Youth and work in the post-industrial city of North America and Europe. Boston: Academic Publishers Brill.
Payet, J.-P., & Franchi, V. (2008). The rights of the child and “the good of the learners”. A comparative ethnographical survey on the abolition of corporal punishment in South African schools. Childhood, 15(2), 157–176.
Payet, J.-P., & Franchi, V. (2009). “Mauvaises pratiques” et burn-out dans l’école sud-africaine. Une perspective compréhensive sur la relation éducative en contexte historiquement racialisé et en transformation. Journal of Educational Research in Africa (JERA) – Revue Africaine de Recherche en Education (RARE), 1(1), 36–44.
Payet, J.-P., & Giuliani, F. (2010). Du tabou au débat : impensés, résistances et idéologies autour du problème de la ségrégation ethnique dans l’école française. In M. Mc Andrew, M. Millot, & A. Triki-Yamani (Eds.), L’Ecole et la diversité: Perspectives comparées. Politiques, programmes, pratiques. Laval: Presses universitaires de Laval.
Payet, J.-P., Giuliani, F., & Laforgue, D. (Eds.). (2008). La voix des acteurs faibles. De l’indignité à la reconnaissance. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Payet, J.-P., Rostaing, C., & Giuliani, F. (Eds.). (2010). La relation d’enquête. La sociologie au défi des acteurs faibles. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Payet, J.-P., Sanchez-Mazas, M., Giuliani, F., & Fernandez, R. (2011). L’agir scolaire entre régulations et incertitudes. Vers une typologie des postures enseignantes de la relation à autrui. Education et sociétés, 27.
Poiret, C. (1996). Familles africaines en France: Ethnicisation, ségrégation, communalisation. Paris: CIEMI-L’Harmattan.
Schatzman, L., & Strauss, A. (1973). Field research: Stratégies for a natural sociology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Schütz, A. (1962). The problem of social reality. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff.
Simmel, G. (1999). Sociologie. Etudes sur les formes de la socialisation. Paris: PUF.
Strauss, A. (1959). Mirrors and masks: The search for identity. Glencoe: Free Press.
Strauss, A. (1978). Social world perspective. In N. Denzin (Ed.), Symbolic interaction (pp. 119–128). Greenwich: JAI Press.
Strauss, A., Schatzman, L., Bucher, B., Ehrlich, D., & Sabshin, M. (1963). The hospital audits negotiated order. In E. Freidson (Ed.), The hospital in modern society. New York: The Free Press.
Toulemonde, B. (1997). Rapport du groupe “Etablissements et vie scolaire”. Paris: La Documentation française.
Trancart, D. (1998). L’évolution des disparités entre collèges publics. Revue Française de Pédagogie, 124, 43–53.
Tribalat, M. (1995). Faire France. Une enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants. Paris: La Découverte.
van Zanten, A. (2001). L’école de la périphérie. Scolarité et ségrégation en banlieue. Paris: PUF.
Weber, M. (1975). Economie et société. Paris: Plon.
Woods, P. (1983). Sociology and the school. An interactionist viewpoint. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Zirotti, J.-P. (1980). Le jugement professoral: un système de classement qui ne fait pas de différence. Langage et Société, 14, 3–42.
Zirotti, J.-P., & Akers-Porrini, R. (1992). Elèves “français” et “maghrébins”. Un rapport différent à l’orientation scolaire. Migrants-Formation, 89, 45–57.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Payet, JP. (2015). 3.7 Observing Schools in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods in France. In: Smeyers, P., Bridges, D., Burbules, N., Griffiths, M. (eds) International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_30
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9281-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9282-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)