Chapter 4 France as a Deviating Case from Global Reforms on Teacher Recruitment
In: Recruiting and Educating the Best Teachers: Policy, Professionalism and PedagogyPurchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
We live in an era rather obsessed with the figure of the teacher due to: (i) the key role played by teachers in an idea of quality of education that stresses improvement in the students’ academic performance; (ii) teachers’ supposedly necessary and unflagging improvement in their initial training programmes; (iii) a desire of many teachers to have a transformation of their selection processes and induction into teaching; and (iv) the teachers’ need to renew their professional identity by developing professional competency profiles where performance gains ground over specialized knowledge. All these issues have become subjects of recommendations by supranational organizations as well as by other philanthropic agents with interests (of various kinds) in education reform. Once this global reformist agenda is framed in the chapter, a case of pedagogical counter-reform carried out by the French educational system is presented. The different phases through which one manages to become a teacher in France are discussed along with a description of the set of national examinations that applicants who wish to become teachers in France must pass for each of the different existing teaching categories.