ICT, Research and Teacher Education in France: Issues and Perspectives

ICT and the Internet have now become rather commonplace in the French society. However, their integration into every day classroom practice remains an issue. This paper is based on the remark that changes in teaching and learning activities may often be related to prior research, whose results have been disseminated in a selective way, among innovators, then reinterpreted and modified by different actors. Founded on a recent French synthesis, it presents some current research questions and advocates the opportunity of developing modes of cooperative research associating teachers and researchers and including an international dimension, because similar problems appear at the same time in different countries. Context: a strong interest for ICT As in other countries, ICT, and more specifically the Internet, has received in France much attention in the last few years. New words have appeared in French, directly imported from English: web, e-business, e-learning, the “e” being pronounced like English speaking people do, like a French “i”. This is of course not the first time such phenomena occur and it does not prove much in itself, except may be the fact that new realities are quickly disseminating all over the world, and that they are perceived as having originated in the Anglo-American sphere (which is largely true). The level of expectations in the society, as relayed by the media, remains rather high and, so far, there has not been much public expression of distrust toward ICT, like in (Cordes & Miller 2000). Although the rates of connection are probably on the average slightly lower than in the USA, many people do have access to the Internet (particularly in affluent homes and at the workplace, relegating on shelves the Minitel, the French Network Computer first distributed more than 20 years ago). If ICT has therefore become rather commonplace in the French society, and if new activities using the Internet are spreading, there is still a form of digital divide: rates of internet connection in families depends very much upon the social milieu, even if nearly every school children have, in a way or another, access to computers, notably computer games. In schools, a national plan concerning the Internet has been launched by the previous minister of education in 1997, aiming at connecting every school and every teacher to the Internet. Symbolically, teachers have been offered a professional e-mail account, managed by the administration (but they have to pay the internet provider costs). The department of education has also devoted important funds to the dissemination of resources toward teachers and faculty members (MEN 2002). Interestingly enough, relationships are being established between schools, regional or local authorities and enterprises, in order to facilitate Internet access to every school. This is relatively new in France where, except in technological and vocational training, there has been for a long time a rather sharp separation between the hierarchies of the “Education nationale”, relayed in every region and territorial administrative unit, the local authorities and the enterprises. The national level has always been responsible for the contents and modalities of education, while the local authorities have been, since the decentralization laws in the eighties, in charge of infrastructure issues. The enterprises had, until now played a very limited role within schools, except in vocational and technological sectors. With the surge of ICT, one can notice a permeability between traditional boundaries, infrastructure decisions often having pedagogical consequences.