Publish at November 18 2019 Updated May 30 2023
To conduct comprehensive research, Desjeux (2004) suggests distinguishing between micro, meso and macro levels. For him, reality changes according to the focus used to apprehend it. This discernment in interrelated levels makes it possible to distinguish social facts that exist independently of individuals (Durkheim 1894). That is, categories objectified with a view to understanding complex social phenomena.
Social facts are imposed on an individual without his or her awareness. This division into levels avoids mixing observations that belong to distinct sets, while allowing them to be articulated. Let's take a metaphor to grasp what Desjeux is proposing.
For example, the situation of a pedestrian and his or her choices of direction on the roadway, the flow of traffic and moving objects, and the choices of layout at a crossroads are three levels through which we can evoke travel in a city, but each perspective obeys a set of specific variables. An individual's choice of direction is defined by his or her goals and desires (micro), but he or she also takes account of traffic possibilities (meso). The flow of traffic is linked to the number of objects in motion and to the topographical conditions induced by urban planning or local geography (macro). Reasoning in terms of interrelated levels avoids shortcuts in meaning or confusion.
Associating dissociated levels of meaning too head-on, the conclusion can be spectacular but false. The hypothesis is that each level has attached to it an attractor of meaning that organizes the social facts whose grouping reinforces their explanatory power.
An individual's travel decisions will escape forced cause-and-effect links. French pedestrians are disrespectful of traffic signs (micro explanation), when there are no cars he crosses the traffic flow (meso level), which worsens the mortality rate for pedestrians who don't see vehicles coming (macro level).
We're also familiar with the example of mass unemployment and the shortcut that consists in saying that there are unoccupied jobs (macro observation) and that the unemployed only have to cross the street to occupy them, but that they resist (micro explanation) without taking into account the way in which individuals envisage stronger psychological coherences at their level, such as habitat, friendships, relationships with family, preferences.
And often the solution of training is put forward to bridge or explain this gap (meso level). This mix of levels leads to shortcuts, and produces adequationist training policies that naively postulate that it's enough for an unemployed person to be trained in the skills of jobs in short supply for the general situation to improve. The proximity of social facts to the same level of meaning, and the construction of their interrelations, goes beyond the simple cause-and-effect link that is so reductive when the principle is applied to social links.
This perspective of reasoning in levels is based on the idea of a social world that is not given in itself, but is a human co-elaboration. It is akin to a socio-constructivist approach. The rules of construction, the complexity to be taken into account is helped by this distinction in levels, which plays a role in organizing meaning. This distinction is relevant to learning, which concerns individuals (their willingness to learn, at the micro level), situations of experience, educational technologies or learning devices (at the meso level), and the environment and general learning conditions induced by the regulatory framework, infrastructures, housing or transport organization (at the macro level).
An innovation theory is based on this construction of social facts. This theory endeavors to link spaces of creativity, discovery and institutionalization. It articulates 3 levels: underground, middleground and upperground (Simon 2009).
The expression was used in the late 1980s by Amabilé (1988) to depict individuals capable on their own scale of creating around themselves micro societies that others, evolving within the common norms of behavior, call deviant.
In this space, individuals creatively invent other ways of forming society and imagining living together. Groupings and creative communities test solutions to problems whose possible outcomes they alone can perceive. These creative outsiders are deemed to evolve below a threshold where organizations with more resources are able to generalize and institute these new practices.
Middleground is the space for updates, and upperground the space that will architect them.
Middleground is the space for uncovering singular practices. This discovery takes place within collectives, communities, unusual moments, in neglected places that, at the same time, resist new practices and serve as their testing ground.
New uses confronted by a variety of receptors are refined and reinforced. What has grown up in the shadow of criticism or a hostile climate can now find new allies and promoters. This space, where multiple groups meet, test and experiment, functions like a living laboratory. Sometimes it's a place (a café, a meeting space, an incubator, the bangs of an institution, a marginal educational space...), sometimes it's an event, a meeting, a detour.
.Upperground is the space of institutionalization. New uses already appropriated by clusters or networks of users are promoted by institutions for their own ends.
This is the time for a new redefinition and massification of usage, supported by more substantial investment. Political and economic players, with considerable resources at their disposal, are investing in and systematizing the outlets they have glimpsed, sometimes dulling the originality of the approach or, on the contrary, increasing the potential foreseen by the pioneers.
.What a breakdown into levels allows is a form of coring of social facts that take on meaning according to the soil that saw them come into being, but, without forgetting the more global whole in which they are situated. Today, these levels of meaning are innervated by computer networks, which accelerate the circulation of ideas and contacts. A little like a tree's root system, socio-numerical networks inform, connect distant parts, initiate awareness of belonging to a whole.
Among these socio-numerical networks, those that increase the knowledge available (MOOCs, training platforms, monitoring and tutorial information blogs, etc.) act as fertilizers and contribute to the vitality of circulations.
Aligning all levels
Observers sometimes struggle to understand why a digital training device is effective in some circumstances and ineffective in others. Meta studies display the result " no significant difference " by compiling all the different data. According to current epistemology, they use a comparable discipline and set of facts, but are unable to identify with any certainty what is reproducible and what is from a singular occurrence. One hypothesis would be to say that a level plays its role when it is aligned with the others. The factors would be identified at each level.
To take a simplified example, the learner is willing to learn (micro level), the proposed platform is run by trained volunteer facilitators (meso level) and the structural, legal, organizational, financial and political conditions are supportive (macro level). Alignment is the configuration in which all the factors at one level coalesce to produce one result. According to this hypothesis, what matters is not so much technological quality, or a teacher's know-how, or a learner's motivation, but rather the coherence of solutions at each level. Paradoxically, what would appear to be a mediocre device if it were consistent with the other levels could ultimately be more effective.
The search for coherence will certainly involve taking better account of the real activity of learners, actors in connection with the effective possibilities of the learning environment. So, rather than applying ready-made solutions, let's focus on making them consistent with local possibilities.
Sources
Simon, L. (2009). Underground, upperground and middleground: creative collectives and the creative capacity of the city. Management international/Gestiòn Internacional/International Management, 13, 37-51.
Amabile, T. (1988). A model of creativity and innovation in organizations, Research in Organizational Behavior, 10(2), 123-167.
Desjeux, D. (2004). Les sciences sociales. Presses universitaires de France.
Socioconstructivism is not a theory of teaching! Etienne Vellas
https://www.meirieu.com/FORUM/vellas.pdf
Durkheim, É. (1894). The rules of sociological method. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger, 37, 465-498.
Thot Cursus - Denis Cristol - No significant difference
https://cursus.edu/12470/pas-de-difference-significative
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