Artist status, cultural capital, class codes, all of this enters the room before the first word is spoken and weighs on what students will dare to do. I propose here concrete ways of working with this position rather than concealing it, transforming the space, naming each person, putting bodies into action, taking a situated point of view.
“We are all white, we have a well-meaning class position”
During a training session with a theatre company, an actor who was thinking aloud about his own practice said this: “We are all white, we have a well-meaning class position, we arrive with our good values and we don’t know the reality of these children.” There was nothing paralysing about this self-criticism, it described with accuracy an uncomfortable situation that many practitioners know without always putting it into words. I recognised it at once, because this awareness of my place as a dominant, I have carried it for years in my own practice, every time I go and propose something in a classroom. The question the actor was raising remained wide open, though: what do we do with that?
The cultural practitioner who arrives in a school in Seine-Saint-Denis to lead a discussion on racism and discrimination with teenagers, many of whom experience both on a daily basis, is in a position of domination in several respects at once. They have the status of the artist, the person who knows, who creates, who is legitimate. They most often have the social and cultural capital of the dominant class. They are there because they are paid to be, and the young people know it. Pretending that this position does not exist, or neutralising it through forced proximity (“call me by my first name, I’m here for you”), does not remove the domination, it only makes it less visible, and therefore less workable.
Being read before saying the first word
When an artist or a mediator enters a classroom, they do not enter alone. They enter with everything they carry, visible and invisible, their way of dressing, their language, their cultural references, their degrees implicitly legible in the way they speak, their skin colour, their gender. All of this is perceived before the first word, and all of this already tells the young people something about the power relation they are about to find themselves in.
Social psychology has measured what this reading produces. Jean-Claude Croizet and Theresa Claire showed in 1998 that students from working-class backgrounds perform less well on the very same verbal task when it is presented to them as a measure of their intellectual ability, and just as well as the others when it is presented as a simple exercise with no evaluative stakes. Nothing changed in the task, only the situation changed, and with it what each person’s social position comes to do in their mind at the moment of working. Sébastien Goudeau extended this work into real classrooms, with more than a thousand pupils in the last year of primary school and the first year of secondary school. The mere fact of asking pupils to raise their hand when they have finished an exercise is enough to make the performance of working-class children drop, because this gesture stages the gaps and leads everyone to interpret them as differences in ability, when they primarily reflect an unequal familiarity with school culture (Comment l’école reproduit-elle les inégalités ?, 2020).
What this research tells the practitioner is that their dominant position does not act only in representations. It acts in the bodies and the cognition of the students, and it is activated or put on standby by situational details that seem trivial. The first minutes of a session are therefore not a preamble, they decide in part what the students will be able to do afterwards.
Arriving before the students and transforming the room
What I have learned to do with this reality is to turn it into working material rather than an embarrassment to be concealed. In my practice, this begins even before the students arrive. I systematically ask, and I negotiate to make it possible, to enter the room in advance, and I transform it. I move the tables, I rearrange the chairs, I create an installation, I lay out equipment, musical instruments, cameras, props. When the students come in, they do not find the usual configuration in which a standing adult awaits seated children, they find a place they know that has become other, that intrigues and appeals. Each person projects themselves into it. Everyone understands that my presence brought this about, I do not disappear. But instead of everything focusing on the dual relation between the practitioner and the group, with the power relation it carries, the transformed place acts as a third. Psychoanalysis calls symbolic third this common object that stands between people and allows them to meet without projecting onto one another. I have detailed the use of this notion within cultural mediation in a dedicated article, and its articulation with the question of one’s place in The place : an operative concept for emancipatory cultural mediation. Here, the third is not only the object that will be made together, it is the space itself.
The sociologist Guy Vincent gave the name “school form” to this mode of socialisation born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, made of a specific place, a segmented time, codified knowledge and impersonal rules, in which the relation between master and pupils is inscribed before anyone has spoken (L’éducation prisonnière de la forme scolaire ?, 1994). The classroom, with its rows facing the board, is the material form of this configuration. By transforming it physically, one destroys nothing, one suspends for a while the apparatus that assigns places, and this suspension opens a space where other relations become possible. The philosopher Alain Kerlan, who has been studying artists’ residencies in schools for more than twenty years, draws a similar conclusion from his research. Artists bring something to the school, he writes, only insofar as they can “subvert it from within, while remaining themselves”, without bending to the requirements of the school form (L’art pour éduquer ?, 2004). Their mere presence, he observes in the residencies he has followed, modifies school times and spaces. Transforming the room before welcoming the students means taking this observation seriously and making it a deliberate gesture rather than a side effect.
Shaking thirty hands, saying thirty first names
Then, when the students come in, I go towards each person, I shake their hand if they agree, I ask their first name, I repeat it to show that I have heard it, I give mine. You are Ahmed. You are Fatima. You are Loïc. This gesture takes five minutes in a class of thirty students, and these five minutes do something that the rest of the session will not be able to do if they have not taken place, they tell each person present that they exist as an individual, not as a member of a group that is about to receive an intervention. I describe this ritual in more detail in The dramaturgy of welcome. What matters to me here is its relation to the position of domination. Shaking someone’s hand and naming them is recognising their dignity, and it is a direct application of the right to identity formulated by cultural rights in the Fribourg Declaration (2007), the right of each person to be recognised in their singularity. In a classroom where students are usually treated as a homogeneous collective to be instructed, this right is regularly ignored, even with the best intentions. The gesture does not deny my position, it puts it to work. The one who comes to shake hands remains the practitioner paid to be there, but he chooses to open the relation otherwise than his position would allow him to.
Bodies in action, in unusual places
The physical place of bodies, the way they are arranged in relation to one another and the functions to which they are assigned change a great deal. Being dominated is not only an idea one has of oneself, it is an embodied habit, a way of holding oneself, of lowering one’s eyes, of waiting for permission, which school installs in bodies year after year. This is why I propose activities in which bodies are in motion, in unusual places, but always with a concrete action to carry out. Not a dance that everyone would do together, in which each person performs the same thing and in which, in functional terms, the structure of the classroom reconstitutes itself. I take the time to distribute complementary roles, some have to darken the windows, others fetch props, others prepare the stage, others still help a person who needs it. Each person has a role that is not their neighbour’s, the tasks are doable, concrete, and very quickly things go through the body. Unusual gestures displace the habits internalised by each person, the habit of being dominated and the one, even more tenacious, of not managing to leave that place oneself while putting the other back in the place of the dominant.
This distribution of functions cannot be improvised, it constitutes a working moment in itself, and I give it a visible form. In my film workshops for example, before each scene, we build together, in front of everyone, a large mind map on paper, with the story on one side and the distribution of roles on the other. Who acts, who triggers the camera, who brings the props, who holds a light, who makes the sound. This moment when the map is drawn is already part of the creation, and it is decided with the students, not for them. I set only one truly firm rule, each person must be able to do something in the project that genuinely interests them, and a collective project contains enough different tasks for no one to be left aside. I also favour forms in which everyone works at the same time. When a film is shot in a single take, while some students act the scene, the others, behind a curtain, create the sound atmosphere live with instruments. No one waits their turn, and waiting is what reconstitutes the school situation, those who have finished and those who are behind, those who act and those who watch. I have told in detail how this way of distributing functions produces real autonomy for the students, in the account of a project carried out with three secondary school classes around virtual reality, Making virtual reality a ground for pupils’ autonomy.
Goudeau’s work also sheds light on this choice of complementary roles. What amplifies the gaps in a classroom is the staging of comparison, everyone does the same thing at the same time and everyone sees who finishes before whom. Distributing different and complementary functions removes this scene of comparison. No one can be behind anyone, since no one is doing the same thing, and success becomes that of the shared endeavour, not a ranking of individuals.
“When I first saw this scene, here is what I felt”
There is another way of working with one’s own position, which consists in taking a real point of view rather than claiming an impossible neutrality. A company I worked with was debating a question: should we tell young people what we think? The temptation of neutrality is strong, “I am not here to influence, I am here to create the conditions for debate”. But this neutrality is itself a position, and young people perceive it as such. It can even look like manipulation, acting as if one had no opinion the better to lead them to the opinion one already holds. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron showed that symbolic violence is all the more effective when it presents itself as neutral and universal, and that the imposition of a cultural arbitrary succeeds all the better when it conceals the power relations that found it (Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 1970). The practitioner who claims to have no position exercises an invisible domination. The one who owns their position, while leaving room for others, does something more democratic, even if it is more exposed.
What is more honest and more just is to state one’s point of view while presenting it as such, not as the truth, but as a thought that belongs to a specific person with a specific history. “When I first saw this scene, here is what I felt.” This formulation humanises the practitioner, it shows that adults too have subjective reactions, and it opens a space where young people can react differently without finding themselves in opposition to an official truth. bell hooks, who taught all her life students marked by dominations of race and class, made this a pedagogical principle. She refuses to ask students to take risks she would not take herself, and she observes that a teacher who expects students to open up while remaining under cover themselves exercises a power that can become coercive (Teaching to Transgress, 1994). Showing oneself moved, hesitant, situated, does not make one lose authority, it only stops passing it off as neutrality.
To put this principle into practice, there is a simple means, proposing activities in which the adult who leads is not in a position of control but takes part in them. When I propose to a group to make photographs and then look at them together, I too make a photograph, and it passes under the same collective gaze as the others. This is in no way a pose, one genuinely takes the risk of the activity, one also experiences the fear of others’ judgement. One is not thereby stripped of one’s leading place, that place remains, but one institutes connection in other places as well, where one shares the same vulnerability as the people one is inviting to take a risk.
“We still shouldn’t make too much of a mess in the school”
It remains for me to say something about how these gestures meet the school institution and the people who work in it. We who intervene, artists supposed to bring freedom and another point of view, were trained in this type of institution. We too are steeped in it, and this is why moving tables and distributing roles can give us the feeling of a great transgression, when it is a small thing. Teachers can also make us feel that we are asking a bit much, that they are glad to host these cultural activities, but that we still shouldn’t destabilise the groups. We pass through, and after we leave it is they who stay with the students, in the daily reality of the classroom. This fear, which does not inhabit everyone but which one does encounter, is understandable, and it is not unfounded. A cultural activity can genuinely destabilise a group, and the protections that some teachers put in place protect them from something real, sometimes a fear, sometimes a shame. If I am writing this text, it is also to understand what is at play there, and to be capable of a gentle empathy towards these reactions, rather than seeing them as resistances to overcome.
The question then becomes how to make these activities beneficial, and how to ensure that the transgressions of the usual organisation do good to all the human beings present, students and adults alike. One path lies, in my view, in the very fact of being able to speak about our social places. If we have the right to name our places, our prohibitions, our fears, then we can understand together that all of this does not stem from dual relations between individuals, but from social systems that precede us and to which we all submit, teachers and students alike. Students who need to transgress simply in order to exist can then discover that the system also imposes itself on the adults who embody it before them. And the artistic presence can allow something like a shared awareness of the system of staging in which we are all caught, because artists work on staging, reflect on it, down to the staging of the very situations we are living through together.
A crack, not a levelling
Let us be honest, recognising one’s position of domination does not remove it. The white actor with degrees who shakes the students’ hands and says their first names remains the white actor with degrees. The transformed room will become a classroom again the very next day. These gestures do not level social relations and do not produce an egalitarian relationship as if by magic. They do, however, open a slight but real crack in the apparatus of symbolic domination. They say: I know where I stand, and I choose to behave otherwise than my position would allow me to. This crack, however small and fragile, is sometimes enough for someone in the room to feel recognised enough to risk a real word.
I have invented none of this. Many artists and mediators have long been inventing, each in their own way, gestures of this kind, most often by intuition. If I take the time to put words and references on these gestures, it is to legitimise what is already done by intuition, not to explain what others would not have understood.
