ABSTRACT
The chapter written by Stéphane Vaquero concerns the uses and effects of autonomous work in the context of TPE, “Travaux Personnels Encadrés” (personal supervised work) in secondary school when, for two to three hours each week, pupils are expected to raise a personal question about a topic of their own choice, conduct a research process on it, and present their findings in a written or oral production. For the author, the development of this kind of device since the 1970s does correspond to a deep change in curricula. This chapter questions the effects of the directive to perform “autonomous work” in TPE on scholarly and social inequalities. Indeed, pupils are supposed to learn to work without the help of teachers, even if they can ask them questions if necessary. But in practice, observations show that the cultural connivance (or the lack of connivance) among certain teachers and students makes for strong differences in pedagogical supervision. Teachers who are interested in the originality of the topics allow the given students (and help them) to experiment with a “personal style” in writing. On the contrary, pupils with a lower cultural capital must prove they have the expected capability to do “autonomous work”, and teachers tend to consider that they do not have to help them. The chapter presents how the horizontal dispositifs contribute to building and legitimizing distinctive signs of what teachers call “autonomy”. The association of these specific signs and the social and educational skills of students reveals how they tend to reproduce the scholastic and social distribution of cultural capital.
