After a performance for a school class, the discussion often produces the expected answers, and everyone leaves with the feeling of a job well done. What has really happened, however, cannot be read from what was said. I distinguish here two things that this feeling conflates, the validation of a message and the transformation of people, and I draw concrete consequences for the way these encounters are led, down to the apparatus of speech itself.
A pupil, on the way out of the classroom
During a training day I was leading for a live performance company, one of the artists described an intervention that was still on her mind. A class had attended her participatory show about racism and discrimination, in the Belgian Ardennes, and she then led the discussion with the pupils. She asked questions, the answers came, and they were the right ones. Racism is wrong, differences must be respected. She says it herself with lucidity: her questions expected precise answers, and as soon as a right answer came, the discussion moved on. One was enough. What all the other pupils thought carried no weight, since nothing in the format was designed to gather it. The discussion went well, as we say.
Then the class left. It was there, discreetly, away from the others, that a pupil came to tell her that everything they had just talked about, once she was through the door, would have nothing to do with the reality of her life.
There is no cynicism in these words, and I hold them to be the most honest of the day. This pupil had seen what the apparatus did not allow to be seen, the gap between what was said in the room and what is lived outside, and she chose to confide it to the adult, away from the group, once the frame had closed. What had just taken place in the room, she named it without needing the word. It was validation, and transformation is something else.
Giving the expected answer is a craft one learns
Children learn very early to read what adults expect of them. The sociologist Philippe Perrenoud devoted a book to this know-how, Métier d’élève et sens du travail scolaire (1994). Being a pupil, he shows, is a statutory job, assigned to children without their having chosen it, and this job is learned like any other, with its strategies, some of which consist in giving what is expected and feigning agreement when agreement is required, so as to get through the day without trouble. These strategies are the reasonable response of people to an institution that constantly evaluates what they say and what they do.
Faced with an anti-racist show carried by committed artists, in a school setting where everyone knows that words are judged, the right direction is inscribed in the situation before anyone has spoken. Most will therefore validate, and most often sincerely in the moment, because there is no reason to take the risk of going anywhere else.
Guy Brousseau, who developed in didactics the notion of the didactic contract (Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics, 1997), designates by it the set of implicit rules that bind teacher and pupils around knowledge, what each expects of the other without it ever being said. From it he drew a paradox that sheds light on our interventions: the adult who lets the expected answer show can only obtain it as the execution of an instruction, and no longer as the exercise of judgement. Brousseau also gave a name, the Jourdain effect, to the gesture by which a conforming answer is credited with the value of a learning that has not taken place. Monsieur Jourdain is delighted to discover that he speaks prose; the facilitator is relieved to find that the message has come across.
This is what makes these discussions deceptive. Everything in them indicates that the objectives have been reached: the pupils take part, the expected words are spoken, the teachers themselves find the intervention successful. In reality the objective has not been reached at all, for the objective was not to obtain the correct definition of racism, it was to work on something in people’s thinking and in their lives. What participation and right answers measure is the functioning of the apparatus, not anyone’s journey. I have developed in the article Good conscience as a system how these proofs of success inform us about ourselves, about our need to be reassured, and not about the people our work claims to serve.
Paulo Freire called the banking conception of education this movement in which knowledge comes down from the one who knows to those who do not know, who receive it and give it back (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968). A post-show discussion can reproduce this movement exactly as it is, even when it presents itself as an exchange, as soon as a single person holds the questions and the validation of the answers.
Who has never asked children a question while beginning the answer themselves, to set them on the path? The gesture is almost systematic, and Brousseau gave it a name too, the Topaze effect, after the schoolmaster in Marcel Pagnol’s play who dictates « des moutonsse », sounding out the plural his pupil is supposed to write. This very common situation is in fact deeply problematic, because it cancels the very possibility of transformation. It validates nothing but the apparatus, and in no way the transformation of the person. For transformation belongs to the person, and we cannot even know what, within them, will be transformed. The only thing we can organise is a space in which the people present can transform themselves. If, on the contrary, we are in a disciplinary apparatus where the only expectation of the person steering the group is the right answer, that is, the validation of the apparatus, we create a stress under which the people present learn the rules of the game of conformity to the system, and not at all the subjects they are supposed to have come to learn.
Setting the journey as the goal, not the result
When I prepare interventions with artistic teams, I often propose this formulation: to set the journey as the goal, and not the result. It is not relativism. The point is not to say that all positions are equal, nor to give up defending values. It is to recognise that transformation, when it happens, does not happen because an adult said the right things convincingly, but because a person has travelled somewhere by themselves, at their own pace, along paths we do not choose for them and at moments we do not control, sometimes years after the encounter. Jacques Rancière gives this stance its foundation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987). If the equality of intelligences is a starting point and not a horizon, then facilitators are not there to bring young people to understand what the facilitators have understood, but to create the conditions in which something unforeseen can occur.
The pupil from the Ardennes had made a journey of her own. She had done something far more difficult than validating the prevailing discourse: she had observed the gap between the words and her reality, and she had found the courage to say it. And it is worth looking at where she said it. Not during the discussion, where the contract made such words impossible, but on the way out, discreetly, in the interstice where the apparatus no longer applied. Brousseau observes, moreover, that real learning rests less on the smooth functioning of the didactic contract than on its ruptures. The only moment of living thought that this day made visible occurred outside the frame designed to produce it.
Undoing the apparatus of the adult who asks the questions
Concrete improvements are possible:
- Giving up certain indicators of success. A discussion that goes well, where young people take part and repeat the right words, can be less fruitful than an uncomfortable exchange in which someone says something wrong, unexpected or hard to hear.
- Asking questions to which we do not know the answer, rather than questions that expect one. “Do you understand why racism is unjust?” calls for validation; “what did you feel at that moment of the show?” opens onto the unforeseeable.
- Welcoming what disturbs. The pupil who says that none of this has anything to do with her life is not a pedagogical failure; it may be the most precious moment of the day, provided we do not correct her, and receive her words for what they are, a true thought.
But these improvements, if we stop there, leave the apparatus intact. Even the best open question maintains the structure of address that is the problem, an adult who holds the questions, young people who owe them answers. Yet the goal is not to obtain better answers, it is that people ask themselves questions, their own, the ones the show has brought to life and that we do not know. As long as speech has to pass through the adult and return to them, it remains speech addressed to the person who evaluates. What needs working on is the apparatus of enunciation itself, so that speech can circulate among the young people without passing through us, so that it can go unheard by the adult, so that it can even not take place, for the silence of a person who is thinking is a journey too. I have described in the article Training a company in participatory mediation concrete ways of making this shift, sitting in a circle with the pupils, having a word defined in pairs where everyone speaks at the same time and no one controls what is said, building together the place where we will sit. These are not recipes, they are examples of a principle: giving a frame that authorises, and letting people do what they want with it inside.
John Dewey observes in Art as Experience (1934) that aesthetic experience is anything but passive, that it requires a friction between what we bring and what we encounter, and that it is this friction that makes us think. A show that tells its audience what it already knows, extended by a discussion that confirms what its participants already know, offers no friction. The only person who encountered any, that day in the Ardennes, is the pupil who compared the room with her life, and who came to say so. Our work is to build encounters where this experience is no longer the exception that slips out at the door.
