Reconnaissance et éducation identitaire : compétences identitaires et gouvernance scolaire

What can schools do to help students take responsibility for the relationships they have with themselves? Our exploration of this question is broken into four sections. We begin by posing the problem of identity – that of autonomy’s intersubjective vulnerability, which stems from its relational constitution – by reconstructing the central theses of contemporary recognition theories. We then propose the concept of “identity skills” to think through the elements of identity work that could be trained and eventually mastered. We first thematize these skills as unquestioned presuppositions within recognition theories, before leaving this paradigm behind to re-anchor our concept in the conceptual framework of identity reflexivity. At this point, we make a first foray into the realm of practice, in order to examine the possible concrete modalities for integrating identity skill development in schools. The interest of the proposed concept lies equally in the way that it allows for the explicit analysis of those aspects of identity reflexivity that escape the language of skills. As such, in our third section, we put forward a hypothesis regarding the attention that must be paid to the self’s non-pregiven character, as well as the complex relationship that each person maintains with the belief that everyone can always change the relationship they have with themselves. Moving back to practical considerations, we analyze the ways that a school can feed a healthy relationship with this object of belief. Be it by drawing students’ attention to their own developmentality or by becoming models of the self’s transformability, we defend the position that any such work must start with a new investment in teacher reflexivity, which depends more on school governance than on teacher training programs. Finally, in the last section we recontextualize the practical and theoretical results of our study with a look at the philosophical past, the contemporary world, and the future of the climate.(FILO - Philosophie) -- UCL, 201