ABSTRACT
The acquisition of autonomy is often implemented by the teachers who wish to be innovative through the pedagogical strategy of “learning pods”, which organizes the work of pupils in small groups. This chapter proposes to put this belief to the test by studying one such educational dispositif in French class (for 14- to 15-year-old pupils) in a secondary school located in the Paris region. We filmed a class devoted to the study of poems from the 19th and 20th centuries. Each of the six groups made up of four to five pupils dealt with a different poem, following the same instructions. We recorded and transcribed the teacher’s interventions and the discussions within the groups. We also collected the material handed out to the students and their written productions. Two weeks later, we conducted another interview with the teacher and 18 individual interviews with the pupils during which we confronted them with the various elements we had collected. We analysed the material in order to find out whether the pupils were autonomous and to what extent and how the three contracts that we had defined (the social, educational, and didactic contracts) played out.
Our analysis leads us to believe that group work probably ensures a greater commitment to studying than more traditional systems do nowadays. It can also sustain the educational ideal of preparing the citizens of tomorrow in the classroom through respect for others and collaboration. However, the didactic contract doesn’t enable all the students to carry out an academic text commentary exercise independently or to become independent readers capable of turning the reading of literature into an authentic experience of personal development, like the teacher of our study would like it to be.
