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                               MESSAGE
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CALL FOR PAPERS
School as a Place of Tensions and Mediations:
What Impact on School Practices?
International Analysis and Comparisons
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From 22 till 24 June 2006 -  Villeneuve d'Ascq (France)

Deadline: January 10, 2006
Contact
<mailto:Colloqueafec2006@hotmail.fr>
Information
http://afecinfo.free.fr/Lille06/index.html
http://www.lille.iufm.fr/afec2006.htm

PRESENTATION
The French-speaking Association of Comparative Education (AFEC) will co-organise its 30th International Conference of comparative education from 22 till 24 June 2006, in partnership with: to Villeneuve d'Ascq (France), Maison de la Recherche (University of Lille 3-Charles de Gaulle) on the subject:
"School as a Place of Tensions and Mediations: What Impact on School Practices? International Analysis and Comparisons"

CALL FOR PAPERS
During the last few decades, most educational systems have been troubled by the same fundamental problems: moving from elite education to mass education, confronted with a diversification of children from different backgrounds at school, with the teaching contexts, with the rise in demand for social participation; as a result, educational systems, aiming at qualitative democratisation of the school system, have met those evolutions with endogenous adaptations.

We are thus witnessing in different national contexts a rise in the relations of inter-dependency between educational participants, which mainly manifests itself with the promotion of local space, the development of networks, with a multiplicity of contracts, with organisational innovations, with new participants emerging in the public space. However, these transformations also come from exogenous pressures which, under the effect of integration in supra-national political groups, and of the diffusion of common trans-national, organisational, and referential principles in educational issues, generate a certain convergence of structural frames in the regulation of the school system.

Transformations, enlargements, inter-dependency, but also uncertainty: School - in the broad sense of the term - has become uncertain as regards its mission of cultural transmission, following the acceleration and diversification of places and authorities of knowledge, further to the increasingly uncertain recognition of the school system itself, and the growing variability of educational contexts and teachers' work conditions. School is now subjected to tensions linked with the changing conceptions of education, and it has become a means among others of general and professional education. The loss of its monopoly falls within the context of lifelong education being internationalised, and of which school becomes an element. This change is all the more a source of tensions since it questions one of the results of schooling, that is, leaving the educational system, with no qualifications, which in turn questions.

School missions and the present transformations.
School is thus situated at the core of a series of tensions, understood as a group of sometimes contradictory forces - between local, national and trans-national levels, between permanencies inherited from the past and modern requirements, between injunctions from modernisation and change, and ordinary practice in schools. Beyond the dramatic meaning of the notion of tension and the very apparent epiphenomena it implies, aren't these evolutions obscuring quite dynamic realities?

Establishing School as a place of tensions, being interested in the forces more or less well-balanced that exist within it, and in the pressures and instigations which affect it - all this means a new perception of school statics and dynamics, which have exhausted generations of reformers. Nowadays, the enlargement of references and the multiplication of tensions impel the evolution of school to be no longer thought of at a mere national level; but to explore the phenomena of mediation and of mixing the forms of regulations of School as well as the forms of work that those evolutions generate, highlighting, according to a comparative perspective, the observable variations among school uses and practices, referring to different scales of comparison.

How programmatic convergence of educational systems is readable in national contexts, which are contrasted by definition, constitutes in itself an element which encourages comparison, as comparing implies at the same time a delimitation of common problems and local and specific forms of dealing with these problems. The congruence of those two phenomena - international convergence and intra-national diversification - constitutes a first pole of tensions. This symposium wishes to examine their connections as well as their effects on educational practices.

The registering of programmatic convergence in school policies, says indeed nothing about the mediating processes printed by this or that cultural community. But what comparatists are interested in, is not so much the updating of common tendencies as regards school policies, as the light shed on variations in their formulation and appropriation. This leads to question the link between tension, mediation and regulation. Is mediation the process which brings about regulation? What exactly prevents contradiction from becoming a rupture, a negation, but which maintains the connection between contraries in a new, and temporary, balance? Is school the place where these processes are achieved? And who are the actors of the mediating processes?

Because of this perspective, it is all the more important to pay attention to school practices, that is directly teachers'
and pupils' practices, and indirectly, the practices of other in the educational system (whether they be internal, like the administrators, or from the periphery, like the users.) These practices constitute the concrete effective reality of the processes. The word "practices" then implies the pedagogical practice but also all that belongs to the organisation and functioning that can be observed in schools.

The symposium's ambition is to show that, by making the concepts of tension and mediation our own, and by applying them to the study of this specific field of forces that is School, and to its observable practices, the multi-disciplinary process which characterises comparative education, can propose tools for analysis and models of dynamic and dialectical interpretation - linked with processes and interactions -, which enable to overcome such static and formal oppositions as: THEMES AND WORKSHOPS

First theme
- Tensions and mediations in school policies: adaptation processes, convergence and mixing Second theme- Tensions and mediations in managing an educational action Third theme- Tensions ans mediations between school and its public: challenges of building social connections Fourth theme- Tensions and mediations in the (re)defintion of teaching knowledge Fifth theme- Tensions and mediations in teaching A transversal perspective
Eventually, on a transversal perspective, in what respect do all these evolutions open new implications of knowledge for the comparatist and, more broadly, for social sciences?

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Therefore, in a context of School mutation and educational internationalisation, these processes of integration and redefinition of moral values and of social and cultural knowledge at work in more and more interdependent school worlds, are to be questioned by this symposium, from the confrontation of researches made in different cultural contexts and in a comparative perspective, by researchers coming from diverse disciplinary fields (Educational Sciences, Political Sciences, Sociology, History, Anthropology, Law, etc.)

PAPERS
You are invited to submit abstracts online on any topic of the conference (Theme 1 to 5): Please note the following

1- The content of the submission
2- Criteria for accepting individual papers 3- Precisions 4- Abstracts content
Whilst the submissions correspond to the general frame described above, the following are left open: 5- Proposition of Micro-Symposiums SYMPOSIUM LANGUAGE
The symposium language is French.
But the AFEC is interested in promoting linguistic pluralism in international scientific meetings, starting with its own symposia, and thus about finding a certain balance between the priority given to French and opening up to other languages: CALENDAR IN THE COLLOQUIUM
All abstracts will be studied by the scientific committee and assessed by at least two of its members
A notification of acceptance or refusal will be sent to all those who will have submitted an abstract as follows dates: Important point: an accepted abstract will be presented only if the author has registered in due form to the symposium. The registration procedure is independent from submission

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
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Colloque "L'école, lieu de tensions et de médiations" (22-24 juin 2006)
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