Abstract:

With this presentation, we would like to point out that putting in place institutional school set-ups is necessary but rarely sufficient. For the last years, we have been witnessing a drastic rise of organizational set-ups in schools aiming to fight school failure which has social and economic consequences, hence a political problem (Barrère, 2013). Thinking about their adjustment and their sustainability is essential in order to face an increasingly heterogeneous school with regard to the welcomed public and the diversification of the disorders observed (Suchaut, 2007).

Our research project explores school drop-out as an addressed symptom related to personal as well as collective story of each one. A teacher's pedagogical act is conditioned by his subjectivity, his unconsciousness, his desire to transmit knowledge (Weber & Strohmer, 2015), but also by the impact of institutional discourse. We conducted three narrative interviews, one year apart, with teachers from a high school for young adults. The particularity of this school is that they welcome young people who had quit school system and have decided to go back in the aim to obtain a certification. The organizational school set-ups are different from the classic high schools, and for some of them, such as tutoring, they don’t exist in the classic ones.

The preliminary results, based on the qualitative analysis of discourses (Lacan, 1975), show that professional engagement always goes beyond the statutory identity thanks to its particular relation to the speech (“parole”) and the unconscious. Furthermore, every teacher assumes his/her place in the particular set-up called tutoring, regarding his/her own understanding of its aims.

After explaining the tutoring system in this Luxembourgish high school, we will follow by showing, based on our preliminary results, that teachers establish a personalized relationship with the pupils, thus demonstrating a systematic adjustment of their professional position, which is one of the “tutoring” consequences. Thereby, teachers have a feedback on their work from their pupils and are thus called into question and avoid automatisms. On the other hand, some teachers express mixed feeling regarding this set-up, especially within the transference relationship. Tutoring could be a suffering source for some teachers. This type of set-ups favors the relationship between teacher and pupil, provided that the institution supports, encourages it (Dubet, 2010), but also is aware of the difficulties some of the actors could face.

Keywords:

Tutoring, subjectivity, transference, institutional set-ups.