In the creative workshops I lead, the instruction is regularly overstepped, forgotten or reinterpreted, and I have learned to receive these departures as contributions. The instruction is a framework that authorises, not a contract on results. In dialogue with Jean-Michel Zakhartchouk, Jacques Ardoino, Jacques Marpeau and Serge Boimare, I show that the quality of a workshop lies in the process, of which the object produced is the visible sign, and I offer practical guidelines.
« I have the right to speak. I have the right not to speak. »
During a training session with artists who lead sessions with school groups around a show about discrimination, I proposed a simple exercise. Each person comes up to a microphone and plays with a word linked to the themes of the show, repeats it, sings it, whispers it, stretches it out. Nothing more.
An actress came up to the microphone and said, « J’ai le droit de dire. J’ai le droit de ne pas dire. J’ai le droit de penser ce que je veux. J’ai le droit de tout oublier. J’ai le droit de ne pas savoir. » I have the right to speak. I have the right not to speak. I have the right to think what I want. I have the right to forget everything. I have the right not to know.
It was not a word, it was several sentences. She had interpreted the instruction in her own way, or freed herself from it. I could have corrected her, and I did not, because what she had just produced was more precise than any word, and because her way of receiving the instruction said something essential about what these artists’ young audiences need, authorisation. She had, moreover, fulfilled everything the exercise really asked, she had come up to the microphone, she had recorded like everyone else, her voice was part of the shared whole.
Small hands we had not yet seen
If I tell this story, it is not because it is exceptional, it is on the contrary because it happens all the time, in every workshop, with every kind of group. In my photographic creation workshops, the instruction often asks that at least one hand be present in the image. During a collective screening, in front of one photo, some participants reacted, « ah, the instruction wasn’t followed, there were supposed to be hands in the photo ». We looked again, and the hands were there, small, deep in the image, no one had seen them yet. The supposed departure did not even exist, but the remark itself showed how much conformity to the instruction remains, for many of us, the first criterion of looking, before the image itself. I recounted in What words do to cultural policy how, during the photographic creation workshop that opened my morning on mediation at the Cerisy symposium, one trio had not followed the instruction, and why I made a point of not treating it as a fault, because transgressing an instruction is a contribution, not a mistake.
I also observe that the instruction is generally better followed when people create in teams than alone. In a group, someone remembers, checks, reminds the others, attention to the rule is distributed among several people. A person working alone, absorbed in what they are doing, drifts away from it more easily, and this drifting often goes together with the deepest engagement in the creative work.
In all these situations, what matters to me is that the actress recorded like everyone else and that every team made its photo. When the facilitator welcomes the departure instead of pointing it out, no symbolic tension settles on the object produced, and what remains is an object that emanates from a process, carrying the singularity of the people who made it.
An instruction is never transparent
Jean-Michel Zakhartchouk, a secondary-school French teacher and teacher trainer, devoted an entire book to this question, Comprendre les énoncés et consignes (Understanding Assignments and Instructions), CRDP d’Amiens and Cahiers pédagogiques, 1999, reissued by Réseau Canopé in 2019. He starts from an observation built up over years of practice in working-class schools, a large share of school failure comes not from a lack of ability but from the fact that pupils have not understood, or have understood differently, what was being asked of them. An instruction is never transparent. It carries implicit assumptions, disciplinary habits, expectations the adult believes obvious because they have carried them for so long. Understanding an instruction is intellectual work in its own right, and Zakhartchouk rejects the easy solution of simplifying instructions until all difficulty is removed, proposing instead to equip pupils to face it.
What I take from this work is that the gap between the instruction given and what the person does with it is precisely the place where their intelligence is at work. School most often treats this gap as a problem to be reduced, and from its point of view it has its reasons, since a test must be markable. In a creative workshop, the same gap changes status. No one will correct the photo, the film or the recorded voice. The interpretation of the instruction, including the interpretation that oversteps it, is part of the work.
S’autoriser, the word that links author and authority
Jacques Ardoino, a professor of educational sciences, proposed the word authorisation to name what education aims at (Les avatars de l’éducation (The Avatars of Education), PUF, 2000). In French as in English, authority, authorisation and author share the same Latin root, auctor, formed on augere, to augment, to make grow. To authorise oneself, in the strong sense Ardoino gives to the reflexive form, is to acquire the « capacité de se faire soi-même son propre auteur », the capacity to make oneself one’s own author, to recognise oneself as the origin of one’s acts. He held this process to be even more decisive than autonomy, a word that in his view remains inadequate as long as it is used on its own.
Jacques Marpeau, who trained specialised educators for decades, extends this thinking in Le processus éducatif (The Educational Process), Érès, 2000, in which an entire chapter describes the process of authorisation. Two of his analyses illuminate what happens in a workshop. One must have been authorised in order to authorise oneself, and one only authorises oneself in relation to a framework. Marpeau adds that this process requires trust, that is, the experience of being able to rest on someone in order to risk leaving one’s defensive postures, and he warns against what he calls the ideology of mastery, the figure of the educator who would claim both to lead and to liberate.
The instruction can then be understood differently. It defines a territory, a time, a material, and entrusts the person with the way of inhabiting it. In this it reassures, it gives support, it says that the space is held and that each person was expected there, and it is this support that makes risk possible. The actress was able to say « I have the right » because a framework guaranteed her that she would be received. I developed in Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression what this conception owes to the psychoanalytic notion of the third, and I return to it here only to recall its conclusion, the framework is not made of prohibitions, it is what authorises.
The way an instruction is formulated therefore says something about the relationship one has with the people one is addressing. An instruction that calibrates in advance the format, the duration and the expected content expresses an anxiety on the facilitator’s part, that of not obtaining what they need, and people perceive this anxiety as distrust towards them, to which they respond by conforming or by resisting. An instruction that traces a territory and entrusts its exploration transmits, along with the task, the trust one places in the person to find their own way. Paulo Freire formulated it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), no one educates anyone else, no one educates themselves alone, human beings educate one another, mediated by the world they share.
The object that speaks to the camera
This role of the framework becomes decisive when the subjects addressed are sensitive, politically charged, personally close. When we invite teenagers to talk about racism, gender or discrimination, we touch on realities that concern them from the inside, through their own experience, through that of people close to them, through their place in social hierarchies. An overly directive instruction asks them to produce an answer about something that touches them deeply, in a format they did not choose, in front of a group whose views they cannot know, and this demand can do violence.
An exercise I often propose takes a completely different path: in a small group, we shoot a single sequence shot, passing the camera from hand to hand, and each person films an object whose voice they perform. The object speaks about its life experience, as if it were being interviewed. A theme can be given: objects that have been incarcerated, objects discriminated against because they are feminine, objects whose images have been shared on social media against their will. Through this oblique approach, people say things about themselves, by way of the imagination, that are far deeper and more sincere than if they were exposed in front of the camera, where they would first have to protect themselves. And those who are not ready to speak can remain silent, but the camera will pass through their hands. The detour often says something truer than the expected answer, and each person takes part, in their own measure.
Serge Boimare built an entire pedagogy on this detour. A teacher in special-needs classes who became a psychopedagogue, he shows in L’enfant et la peur d’apprendre (The Child and the Fear of Learning), Dunod, 1999, then Ces enfants empêchés de penser (These Children Prevented from Thinking), Dunod, 2008, that for many children in severe school failure, the learning situation itself awakens fears that freeze thought, and that ordinary pedagogical tools remain powerless against them. His answer, which he calls cultural mediation, passes through the reading of myths and tales. These narratives give the burning questions, violence, abandonment, rivalry, a right to exist, figuring them in a symbolic register that renders them, in his word, « fréquentables », safe to approach, and then offer the thread to move away from them towards abstraction and rule. The object that speaks to the camera does this same work of figuration. Discrimination, confinement, unwanted exposure find a form that puts them at a distance, and this distance, far from weakening the words spoken, sets them free. I developed in The Thirty Seconds That Belong to Them the way fear works through learning situations, in learners as well as in the adults who accompany them, and the oblique route is one of the surest tools for not awakening it needlessly.
The act that oversteps and wounds
There remains the most delicate question, that of the overstepping that wounds, discriminatory speech, provocation, sometimes a violent act, under cover of having « misunderstood the instruction ». I have no assured method on this point, it is a subject on which I am still searching, and I share here the current state of my thinking.
The temptation is to correct immediately, « that’s not what I asked for », « that is not acceptable ». Limits must be set, and setting them is part of the framework. But before correcting, it is worth listening to what the overstepping says. Teenagers’ provocations in discussions about discrimination are often ways of saying « I am not on the side you expect », or « my reality does not look like what you describe », or again « I feel something I cannot put into words any other way ». If a person gets to that point, even while calling things into question, it is because they have felt something, and this feeling has value, independently of the judgement one will pass on the form it took.
What serves as my compass is never to depart from respect for the dignity of the people involved, of all the people involved. When a violent act occurs, when someone has hit someone else, there is the dignity of the victim to protect, and there is also that of the person who committed the act to maintain, because situations are often more complex than they appear, and because a human being cannot be reduced to their worst act. The reframing then bears on the form, « here we do not target anyone in particular, but we can say what we think », and not on the substance of what the person feels.
And there is the collective. Trusting the group, keeping a space of expression open rather than closing the situation down with a sanction that would end it, is wagering that something can be built even out of the most dramatic situations, and that each person can come out of them having learned. The return to authoritarianism produces the opposite movement, it closes things down, it takes away from people the responsibility for what has just happened, and with it a share of the autonomy one claimed to be building. Marpeau would say that they are put back in the position of being led, and I would say more simply that the opportunity to learn something together has been missed.
Award-winning films with missing credits
I have often had small teams make single-take films, with a precise instruction, to include in the shoot itself the title at the beginning and the credits at the end, by writing them, for example, on sheets of paper that are filmed. Regularly, teams forget the title or the credits, so absorbed are they in their subject and their shoot. To my mind, the essential lies there, they invested themselves, engaged in what they had to do, and forgetting the credits is the sign of that engagement, not of negligence.
The rest of the arrangement does the work. When all the films are screened together, most have their title and their credits, and those who forgot them see it for themselves, without anyone needing to tell them. This discovery, made through comparison with peers rather than under an adult’s correction, sinks in durably, and the teams have learned something in the process, they are enriched by it. Their film, meanwhile, can be excellent, films made in these workshop conditions have won first prizes at major festivals.
This is, at bottom, the shift I am proposing, not to focus on the result but on the process. The result is the product of the quality of the process, it is its visible sign, and that is precisely why it can be remarkable. What we work on is the quality of the process, and I described in Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression how presenting the process, rather than the result alone, protects shared creation projects from the aesthetic injunctions that distort them.
Making the instruction a framework, in practice
To conclude, a few concrete guidelines, drawn from my practice, for those who lead workshops.
- Give a light formal constraint rather than a subject. A hand in the image, a word at the microphone, an object that speaks. The constraint shifts the paralysing question of expression, « what am I going to say about myself? », towards a technical question, « how do I go about it? », and while the technical problem is being solved, expression comes about.
- Describe the territory, not the expected object. The time, the space, the material, the theme. Refrain from describing what the result should look like, for this description would calibrate people’s thinking in advance.
- Hold one single non-negotiable point, that each person makes something. Vigilance bears not on the conformity of the productions but on the fact that no one is left aside, that each person or each team has their photo, their film, their turn at the microphone. That is what makes a framework and what makes a bond.
- Welcome the departure before correcting it. Ask what the overstepping says, about the person, the group, the instruction itself, and name it, when the occasion allows, as a contribution.
- Take the oblique route as soon as the subject touches on the intimate. The character, the object, the drawing, movement through space. The detour protects, and it is this protection that makes sincere speech possible.
- Reframe on the form, never on dignity. Set the limits that protect the group, without disqualifying what the person feels or reducing them to their act.
- Look at all the productions together. The collective screening does the work that a correction would have confiscated, each person situates for themselves what they have made, within the diversity of what the others have made.
- Present the process as much as the objects. Document, tell, have people tell. It is the process that carries the value of the work, and the objects bear witness to it.
