ABSTRACT
Preschool teachers in France require their pupils to carry out an increasing number of activities autonomously. To do so, they rely on pedagogical resources (“game corners”, “independent workshops”, “worksheets”, “work plans”, “responsibility boards”, etc.) that several studies have sought to characterize. These studies have shown that the resources employed by teachers and the uses to which they are put have evolved over time. They have drawn attention to the different ways in which resources are received by pupils and to the social and educational inequalities to which they may contribute. However, research in this area has not always considered the variety of uses that may be made of resources by teachers at a specific point in time and the implications of this variety for pupils’ learning.
The aim of this paper is to highlight the value of this approach. The study is based on an analysis of the practices of two teachers in the same preschool class in a French école maternelle observed for a total of 60 hours over the course of the same academic year. Using this methodology, we show that the uses of the same resources vary considerably, with the forms of autonomy constructed by the two teachers proving to be significantly different. These observations point to the need to take the influence of teaching practices into better account and to question the supposed uniqueness of the “pedagogy of autonomy” and the nature of its links with learning inequalities.
