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Towards Developmental Psychodynamics

1.1. Spatio-temporal points of reference and development

The challenge of this first chapter is to rethink the coordinates of time and space in life, work, training and study. To promote individual and collective development, it is sometimes necessary to open the black boxes, to free ourselves from frameworks and house arrests; we are thinking in particular about the sharing of power and knowledge between disciplinary academic fields that hampers inventiveness. Here, philosophical thinking and the analysis of sociotechnical processes become intertwined, and ethical considerations seek to be articulated through the analysis of uses and tools. We wish to encourage a fresh perspective on development, based on collective intelligence.

1.1.1. Sense of normativity

1.1.1.1. Normativity: orientation of behavior

"From his years as a pacifist Canguilhem had thus retained not a love of revolt or opposition, but the very essence of their deep causality: a true spirit of resistance, grounded in the effectiveness of prohibition and authority. Every man ought, in his view, to be a rebel, but every rebellion ought to aim at a creation of an order higher than that of subjective liberty: an order of reason and conceptuality." (Roudinesco 2010, p. 25)

The notion of normativity is borrowed from the physician and philosopher Georges Canguilhem. First of all, it is a reference in terms of life projects and committed life, human development in its vital and social dimension, and the demand for human dignity: the subject, built up through a journey and trials and tribulations, must be able to answer for their life, choices and determinations.

Through an analysis of the trajectories that we will develop throughout this book, ethical questions arise along with the observation that they constitute the major challenge, the axis around which everything can be organized, the gravitational center where decisions are made, orientations are colored, and health and vitality (of individuals as well as groups) are maintained and updated.

Normativity is the ability to invent responses based on a knowledge pattern, a set of rules; it functions as an organized whole, a proposal and response matrix, geared towards action in an environment with which it is congruent, but which it can also cause to change, or allow it to resist.

Normativity can lead the subject to break off cooperation with its environment, in order to invent elsewhere a continuity made impossible in the present state:

"I am well to the extent that I am able to take responsibility for my actions, to bring things into existence and to create relationships between things that would not come to them without me, but which would not be what they are without them. And so I need to get to know what they are in order to change them." (Canguilhem 2002, p. 68, author's translation)

Normativity cannot be studied outside of a living environment, its interactions and values (Le Blanc 1998; Macherey 2009; Jeler 2014). These are trends: they consist less of adapting to externally imposed standards than inventing new standards that are exercised and clarified. In this respect, imagination is at the heart of reason:

"To live, for the animal already, and even more so for the human, is not only to vegetate and conserve, it is to face risks and to triumph over them. Health is precisely, and mainly in humans, a certain latitude, a certain play of norms of life and behavior. What characterizes it is the capacity to tolerate the variation of standards to which only the apparently guaranteed and always necessarily precarious stability of situations and the environment confers a misleading value of definitive normality." (Macherey 2016, author's translation)

Orientation and project questions run through this book as they do through the activities of the teacher-researcher (in terms of teaching, research, institutional and socio-professional involvement), in particular:

• - in supporting the student's professional project and by focusing on cases of young people in biographical and professional transition;
• - by making research an individuation lever for actors (researchers, stakeholders), by encouraging the reflexive process of anamnesis and elaboration;
• - as part of the monitoring and evaluation of a higher education establishment strategy (territorial integration, development issues).

While the focus is primarily on the construction of young adults' educational pathways and first experiences, as well as on their ability to allow themselves to speak out, take risks and make choices, the reflection can be extended to the development and transitions of collectives and organizations, based on autonomy (vs. heteronomy), normativity (vs. normalization), responsibility (vs. passivity), and the use of oneself or ourselves (vs. withdrawal).

In the field of training or apprenticeships, reference to normativity leads to a further mastery of knowledge, a technique, a tool, a resource, that is, what mastery makes possible in terms of the subject's activity (psyche and action).

The study of normativity is also interesting from the point of view of girls and women: they grow, learn, inherit, speak out, are in a chain of transmission. They invite us to grasp differently social relations, classes, powers and generations. They invite us to design new forms of work and support, including through research.

It turns out that the introduction of a woman's perspective in the problematization of human issues (which we articulate without limiting it to gender studies) leads to the identification of stumbling blocks, or deviation points, or convergence lines, which we will soon see how to make productive.

1.1.1.2. Normativity: knowledge and academic ethos

In the field of training in teaching and education, it seems useful to share with the professional community a sensitivity to weak or more obvious signals of passivity, error, misinterpretation or even disorientation in the school space.

This is a work of objectification, cross-observation and problematization; it is also a matter of operationalizing and translating theoretical texts into observable indicators, providing tools, and enriching and deepening practical experience.

The work of co-constructing analytical tools and training is based on the notions of implicitness, cognitive stakes, didactic adjustment and secondarization. It requires an incessant movement back and forth from practice to generality and from general reference points to their operationality. The aim is to build a toolbox for observing practices in different disciplinary fields and to test these tools on a variety of teaching sequences, around various disciplinary knowledge. The approach is intended to be co-constructed between trainers in disciplinary didactics and trainers in psycho-sociology (Couture and Bouissou 2003): it puts to work the normativities specific to the trainers' disciplines, engaging them to experience for themselves the articulation, convergence and multi-referentiality that are advocated in the training projects.

Work carried out over the last few decades has shown that students with difficulties have a tendency to focus on the ordinary, familiar meaning of tasks, objects or content, and that they do not identify the cognitive issues involved and transfer little of their knowledge from one domain to another:

"They are locked in a perspective of doing, by seeking immediate success, and they handle school tasks without trying to grasp the meaning of them, that is, what they could potentially learn from them." (Bautier and Goigoux 2004, p. 90, author's translation)

They are unequally prepared to cope with the requirement of secondarization, and they are all the less helped to do so since this requirement remains very largely implicit and opaque to the teachers for whom these changes in status and register are self-evident.

The less professionals take the measure of the academic characteristics (in other words, its second dimension regarding ordinary practical life, which is less obstinately reflexive), the less they make it an object of study, and the less they help the students to build a secondarized relationship with the world, which is a condition for successful learning at school.

The key concept of "secondarization" refers to a cognitive disposition on which school activities are based. Built by the school, starting in kindergarten, it allows the development of reflexivity, distancing, and the transformation of the lived and familiar, through their decontextualization. This provision is initially rooted in the primary family upbringing. Since it is not present in a stable and equal manner in all children, secondarization becomes a process of differentiation and further inequalities. By engaging more fully in metacognitive analysis of activities, successful students understand the normative nature of school: they grasp the issues, the foundations, the intentions, the methods and the strategies.

Failure or success at school is the result of a confrontation between students' socio-cognitive dispositions and the impenetrability, or implicitness, of school requirements. What makes the difference between failure and success therefore is ultimately the greater or lesser ability of students to rely on cognitive clarity and knowledge of the school's issues. The...