Anne Pignault

A Systemic Approach to Interpersonal Relationships and Activities Among French Teleworkers

Within a systemic and interactional approach, this study seeks to understand how French teleworkers (re)organise their relationships with others as well as their activities. Lexical analysis of interviews with 24 telecommuters (nomadic, alternating and working at home full‐time) confirms and complements the results in the literature in this field. On one hand, the findings confirmed a decline in the quality of professional relationships due to their being mediated through technology. On the other hand, there was a distinction between the ways in which different types of teleworkers ascribed meaning and adapted their activities and business, family and social relationships.

Workplace Attachment and Meaning of Work in a French Secondary School

This research aims to gain a better understanding of the attachment of teachers to their workplace by identifying the areas to which they become attached and which give meaning to their work. Based on the belief that place attachment is an affective bond between a person and his or her environment (Bonnes & Secchiaroli, 1995), its aim is to identify the attachment of secondary school teachers to their workplace, which is viewed as a whole but also as a combination of specific places, and to show that the places that predict overall workplace attachment are also those that give meaning to work. A Workplace Attachment Scale was completed by 158 teachers in a secondary school in the Paris region (France). This questionnaire contained items evaluating attachment to each specific place of work and others adapted from the meaning-of-work scale evaluating the meaning given to each of these places. The results show that all the teachers were more closely attached to places that provide opportunities for informal communication than to those directly related to teaching. The main workplace attachment predictors also concern places constituting the essence of the profession and/or places where teachers can manage their organizational stress.

Strategies and perspectives of school actors during a reform of vocational training in Luxembourg

Since 2008, a reform of vocational training is being implemented in the upper level of secondary education in Luxembourg. The new method consists of: (1) teaching through competencies; (2) modular training where modules can be repeated until they are achieved; and (3) evaluation which has been changed from quantitative to qualitative. The reform continues to face ongoing challenges and resistance from the different actors involved in vocational training. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with the relevant actors in order to analyse their strategies and perspectives during and after the reform: representatives of the Ministry of Education, teaching staff, school administrations, enterprises, parents, and pupils. A heuristic model of resistance to change in education was constructed, based on these interviews. A general fatigue with the reform has spread; and this is at a moment when the Ministry wants to implement new changes to the aforementioned law. In order to make the reform viable, a new negotiated agreement based on the interests of the different players should be achieved.

Competences as seen by teachers and employers in an initial vocational training reform

Luxembourg has a dual system of initial vocational training, inspired by the German model, where training takes place alternately in enterprises as well as in schools. Since 2008, a competence-based reform of vocational training is being implemented in the upper level of secondary education in Luxembourg. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with the relevant actors to analyse their strategies and perspectives during and after the reform. It appears that one major difficulty in the implementation of the reform is the difference between schools’ and enterprises’ understanding of what competence-based training is. The majority of teaching staff disagreed with training through competences as it was considered a more difficult and less manageable approach for them than the previous knowledge-based methods. When they adopt the prescribed approach albeit reluctantly, they often attribute it a meaning which is mostly school-based, where competences are seen as skills in exercises based on books and programs and not in professional situations. Enterprises were in favour of curricula based on competences, as they are more suited to the practical work expected in the professional domain. Pupils are confronted directly with practical professional situations at the workplace, but enterprises have problems in implementing explicit, systematic and progressive modular training. Coordination between these two main actors in the training system is poor and problematic; especially with regards to collaboration within the curriculum teams that are expected to develop and update the training modules. A general fatigue with the reform has spread, even if most actors agree, at least verbally, with its general philosophy; and this at a moment when the Ministry wants to implement new changes to the law. In order to make the reform viable, a newly negotiated agreement based on the interests of the different players, especially between enterprises and schools, should be achieved.