Criticality Within the “École de la République”: A Study of a French Educational Programme Based on Scientific Research

Traditionally inspired by Durkheim’s pedagogical theories according to which knowledge transmission and instillation aims at liberating young generations from non-universal influences (localisms, religions), the “Ecole de la République” has traditionally never taught criticality. However, French educational system has always negatively sanctioned “too school like” pupils, that is those not owning enough criticality towards what they learn at school. Influenced by OECD’s recommendations according to which critical thinking would be one of the most important twenty-first-century learning skills, although it is not clearly defined, French educational system lately promoted programmes more or less explicitly related to criticality. Through a sociohistorical point of view and a discussion of some outcomes of an ethnographic survey within one of these programmes taking place in some primary and in secondary French classes, this chapter aims at questioning its scope and what is at stake with these issues of criticality in contemporary French educational system

Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique, and Trends

This chapter introduces the transdisciplinary research movement of critical discourse analysis (CDA) beginning with its definition and recent examples of CDA work. In addition, approaches to CDA such as the dialectical relational (Fairclough), sociocognitive (van Dijk), discourse historical (Wodak), social actors (van Leeuwen), and the Foucauldian dispositive analysis (Jager and Maier) are outlined, as well as the complex relation of CDA to pragmatics. Next, the chapter provides a brief mention of the extensive critique of CDA, the creation of critical discourse studies (CDS), and new trends in CDA, including positive discourse analysis (PDA), CDA with multimodality, CDA and cognitive linguistics, critical applied linguistics, and other areas (rhetoric, education, anthropology/ethnography, sociolinguistics, culture, feminism/gender, and corpus studies). It ends with new directions aiming towards social action for social justice