Sophie Wustefeld

Institutional pedagogy for an autonomous society: Castoriadis & Lapassade

Abstract This article explores how George Lapassade’s institutional pedagogy meets the definition of ‘praxis’ formulated by Cornelius Castoriadis, as the activity creating reflective and deliberative subjects. Lapassade applies Castoriadis’s criticism of bureaucracy to transform the teacher-learners’ relationship and emphasises how self-governance group dynamics among learners facilitates learning in general and access to critical thinking in particular. Castoriadis’s concept of democracy as individual and collective autonomy demands an interpretation of equality as a dynamic process instead of as a state of social relations, both in politics and in classrooms. His understanding of politics as a matter of opinions rather than applied knowledge necessitates a questioning of how the relationship between politics and knowledge is presented in classrooms. The argument articulates two main themes: (1) authority and power both between adults and children and within class groups, and (2) the relationship between knowledge and politics, problematised by Castoriadis’s concept of truth.

Affects and Politics in Classroom: A Group-Based Approach to Education.

Group dynamics in the classroom are a fundamental aspect of learning which, it is argued here, has not received sufficient academic interest. Increasingly, however, research on critical and alternative pedagogy is concerned with exploring the benefits of collaborative learning. This paper recalls the insights of two streams of French institutional pedagogy from the 1960s: the clinical and political dimensions of learning, and the benefits of group-based approaches in education. These pedagogies, based on structural analysis of relationships in the classroom, explore first how teachers’ and learners’ hierarchical relationships to knowledge impede exchange and communication in traditional pedagogies; and, second, how the teacher’s traditional stance in the classroom tends to reinforce psychological stress in learners by placing the teacher as a new parental figure. Both pedagogies introduce mediations or techniques inspired by Freinet, such as the learners’ council, which disrupt hierarchies in the classroom. These mediations enable learners to overcome their mental and affective blocks and become active agents of their individual and collective learning processes.