Frédéric Yvon

Coping With Administrative Constraints by Quebec School Principals

The rapid pace of ongoing change in the Quebec education system has had an important impact on the complexity of the job and the workload of school principals. The present study examined the coping strategies used by school principals when facing administrative constraints. The Administrative Stress Index ASI (N = 238) was used to identify and link the main stressors to the stressful encounters found on video for six principals out of the sample who accepted to be filmed during a working day. Coping strategies were identified in five sequences that met the necessary criteria for the explanatory qualitative analysis. The results show that the main sources of stress come from administrative constraints, and that the principals are not passive but rather try to cope by addressing the constraints they are faced with and by seeking information or support. Principals also have to cope with their emotions and show a lot of self-control. Overall, these findings point to the need for a better understanding of the relationship between stress and coping.

Stability and transformation in configurations of activity: the case of school teaching in France and Mexico

The present article examines the social and cultural dimension of activity, which we propose to call configuration, in reference to Elias’ works. These configurations are characterized by: (1) stability (they do not change a lot); (2) security (for the teacher who can rely on school habits); (3) invisibility (teachers are not aware of them); (4) incorporation (they are culturally inherited); (5) community share (they are common to most teachers around the world). We illustrate these characteristics in two different contexts, each one taken in primary school: in France, in a classroom where the teacher uses a work by contract (seatwork); and in Mexico in a context of reform of the curriculum. These configurations are, simultaneously, conditions of formal learning and objects, which must be informally learned; in spite of their permanency, we try to investigate the conditions of possibility of configuration transformation: lifelong learning is one of these conditions.

Le concept de culture à la lumière de la psychologie historico-culturelle

Ce texte propose une re-interpretation du concept de culture a partir de travaux realises dans des milieux professionnels. Il s’appuie plus specifiquement sur une intervention realisee par des psychologues du travail dans une entreprise ferroviaire aupres d’agents commerciaux. La contribution presente dans un premier temps les fondements theoriques et conceptuels de l’intervention, puis s’efforce, au moyen d’un extrait des protocoles methodologiques, d’illustrer l’idee d’un developpement de la culture professionnelle par l’activite individuelle et inversement, le developpement de l’activite individuelle par la culture professionnelle de reference.