Publish at February 17 2020 Updated June 07 2022
Social norms tell us what is proper to do. They refer in some way to morality, to right and wrong, to good and bad, to just and unjust, to white and black, to " you checked the right box " or " you checked the wrong box ".
In short it refers to a dichotomous world without nuance cut in half. It's either true or it's false. On one side those who are in the norm and on the other side those who are outside of it. Norms inspire and build references, benchmarks, charters, guides that are supposed to orient our behaviors.
When the norms enacted in law are imposed in the professions, they say the recognized professional acts and judgments and eliminate the others. For my part, I claim that the training professions are vitalizing professions and cannot be so strongly referenced as the current trend wishes. For life is lived rather than put into boxes or criteria. It is a well-known strategy of domination to enact rules then claim them as legitimate and finally create a body of customs officers to enforce them and reject those who have less means to assert their singularity. This is the theorization of a rationality.
Several arguments argue for the avoidance of repositories in training
Did quality standards applied to training in the 1990s guarantee anything in terms of quality assurance? The answer is no.
Organizations certified OPQCM or iso 9001 have disappeared due to a lack of responsiveness to their clients. What they were offering met standards that were supposed to serve customers, but obviously the customers didn't know about them.
The same phenomenon can be observed in higher education the AACSB, Equis standards for example do not protect a business school from disappearing. The quality, i.e., what meets the expectations of a society and the individuals who make it up, is not always there.
We could also mention the example of certificates given to coaches for example, Tron the foot fetishist, was a duly certified coach. He used his position of power in a questionable way in his relationships with women. He forgot that he was certified. For the ethical dimension we did better.
Would you agree with your doctor, if he or she explained how one of your organs worked? No. Would you listen to your doctor of education if he told you after a long search that competence is a very rough socially situated and negotiated notion? No. He is not listened to very much.
Even wobbly, the notion is of strong practical significance. Better reason with it or you'll disappear like what's happening now to many small training organizations or independent consultants.
Thus, the large public operators are privileged. You will read with interest the criticisms and limits of the competence of one of the consultants considered as one of the masters in the field. Guy Le Boterf has advised the largest groups and yet he now denounces the limits of this notion (See Knowledge 2013).
So is a building based on a questionable notion stable ?
There is a noticeable difference between the prescribed and the real. You can beautifully meet the standards of a paper file, for example in France the National Quality Benchmark, and you prove incapable of implementing it. Health scandals of all kinds attest to this.
There is even a certification consulting market that has organized itself to promote services. Let's remember that the difference between a desert and an oasis is people, not water. In the same way, the difference between a quality training and a mediocre one lies largely in the trainer and his ability to question the order, not in a brochure that sells you a dream and proudly displays a certification.
All that is said in the referentials is the moral vision of the profession, a dictable technique, a concentrate of professional gestures devoid of context and affect. Yet the work and the training are alive. Setting up barriers is a hindrance to innovation.
Initiatives will be constrained and limited because, outside of reference systems, considerable energy must be deployed to bend accepted ideas. We reinforce consumerism by proclaiming a standard because the customer will say " you do not respect the reference ". It will dig the furrow of conformity encouraged by the standard to be achieved.
I remind you that learning is a coproduction between a mind and an environment. Are we going to certify learners and their minds? Repositories will limit the adaptation of contents and learning methods. I like to co-construct with the learners and start from a blank page, I call this " frame-blanket pedagogy " it becomes inadmissible, yet I feel I am heir to Rogers and a non-directive pedagogy.
And my colleague who creates "journeys into unknown lands" for learners what will she be able to do? She doesn't say where they are going and what they are going to do. They discover. They improvise. They are reacting to something out of the ordinary. The best trainings are the ones that emerge from the situations and the energy of the participants, not the ones that are staged, planned, mastered by a frame of reference. The potential for facilitation is squandered by pretending to master everything. Facilitation is about creating frameworks for action together not just getting into them.
Sliding into molds becomes pie.
Why should any sector be standardized by law and referenced so much? Who is afraid of freedom in education? Among the greatest pedagogues we will find quite a few libertarians like Paolo Freire, resisters likeJoffre Dumazedier. Who would dare tell these guides that they went in the wrong direction ?
How is it that the actual profession and its conditions of practice do not dictate the conduct? Who would dare to dictate to Compagnons du devoir and craftsmen the way they work from which they learn or evolve in their trade? " Do you have a cathedral repository " please?
If the journeymen had to have the complete plans they would not have built anything grand (remember that cathedrals are built over 100 years without a prior plan). For centuries the apprenticeships of the journeymen have excelled. They are guided by the hand, the tool, the imagination, the project and their materials. In training the learner is simultaneously the hand, the tool, the imagination, the project and the material of his own construction. And I claim that all this does not fit into a frame of reference.
No one will enshrine the essence of learning in a repository, for what really matters is the posture and intention of the resource persons and project persons who meet. We see the distress of national education where many teachers suffer from obeying all kinds of circulars that keep changing.
They are normatively practicing a trade of learners (at least that's what we'd like them to do) instead of tapping into vocational strengths available within them. Where to put energy? Let's go, for example, towards high social goals such as the possibility of growing up or even emancipating oneself through the construction of one's own direction, these are the induced effects of the relationship to knowledge that develop in learning together. Why does the School 42 attract people? Because it provides access to meaningful employment, not because it delivers a stamped parchment.
What should guide us is more freedom to learn and to provide enabling environments. The focus should be on encouraging trainers or doers to learn the pedagogical fundamentals, rather than investing in making prescriptions. I advocate making train-the-trainer and pedagogy training free. I advocate strengthening pedagogical commons to improve ways of learning and teaching.
This seems to me to be more beneficial than the standardization effort being undertaken that will cost a fortune in meetings, interpretations of legislation, and news days to figure out how to fill out and maintain records that have a relative connection to reality.
I have certified training activities twice in my career and I perceive the limits of the exercise experienced very often by the teams as an administrative pensum outside their reality and the rules they give themselves, without contextualization or reflexivity on the job.
Sources
The Black Book of HRDs - Jean François Amadieu
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwo5j1
OPQCM- https://dossier.isqualification.com/page-opqcm-presentation.htm
France Certification - ISO 9001
http://www.france-certification.com/les-certifications/iso-9001/National Quality Standard
Ten Years of Research in Adult Education: 2003-2013 Knowledge 2013/3 (No. 33)
https://www.cairn.info/revue-savoirs-2013-3.htm
Thot Cursus - Joffre Dumazedier (1915-2002) Visionaryand Committed Pedagoguehttps://cursus.edu/13044/joffre-dumazedier-1915-2002-pedagogue-visionnaire-et-engage
The conversation.com - Paolo Freire
http://theconversation.com/les-enseignements-de-paulo-freire-un-pedagogue-toujours-actuel-73079
France 2 Travels in an unknown land - https://www.france.tv/france-2/rendez-vous-en-terre-inconnue/
Duty Companions - https://www.compagnons-du-devoir.com/
School 42- https://www.42.fr/
CGE - White Paper International Accreditations for Business Schools
https://www.cge.asso.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2013-01-livre-blanc-accreditations-internationales-des-business-schools.pdf
Chevalier, G. (2008). Rationalities, referentials and ideological frameworks. SociologieS, 2023. https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/2023
Wikipedia - Quality - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualit%C3%A9
Oudet, S. F. (2012). Designing supportive work environments: the example of a reciprocal knowledge exchange network. Formation emploi. Revue française de sciences sociales, (119), 7-27. https://journals.openedition.org/formationemploi/3684
Educsol - Knowledge Commons
https://eduscol.education.fr/numerique/dossier/competences/communs-information-connaissance/introduction-biens-communs/notions-essentielles/communs-de-la-connaissance-theorie-et-constats
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