Un dispositif sans auteur: cahiers et classeurs À L'École primaire

Abstract

In the French school system, the term dispositif (roughly apparatus ) is used by policy-makers and reformers to designate organized and explicit sets of long-term and purposeful educational interventions. The notebooks and loose-leaf organizers used in the primary grades, by contrast, are an apparatus without author, one which exerts a strong but largely unnoticed influence on the manner in wich students and teachers conceive the knowledge and skills acquired in school-their content, thier hierarchy, their value. One effect of the use of this apparatus by teachers is to invest primary education with some of the characteristics of secondary education. An examination of this process enables us to revisit Foucault's characterization of the scholary apparatus, according to which the effectivess of an apparatus resides in its capacity to inscribe particular knowledges within natural -and as a result, invisible -relations of power.