L'etude de I'echec scolaire en Algerie : I'approche par l'etude des representations des enseignants

Abstract EN

Teacher's explanation of failure and success are located in two poles of research: The cluster of sociological obedience and that of social psychology.

The first pole, stemming from the sociology of reproduction (Bourdieu- Passeron, Baudelot -Establet and Bowles-Gentis) comes up against multiple criticisms, which will gradually emerge during the 70s and 80s.

These theories show who benefits from social inequality at school, how "functional" it is, but have much more difficulties in showing "how it works" On the other hand, the interactionist or ethnomethodological approaches aim at describing the procedures, the practical reasoning and the crafts by which the actors build the social and produce, on a daily basis, the norms on which the school institution rests.

Other works from the British ethnographic current (Delamont, Woods, Hammersley) study the strategies through which teachers and students negotiate (implicitly) the "definition of the school situation".

The second pole finds its inspiration in social psychology and particularly in the approach through representations and the theory of attribution .

This current from social psychology poses the problem of the influence of the teacher, his system of representations, his behavior and his attitudes on the success of his students.

The explanations that give teachers the causes of school failure are central to the concerns of this approach.

It will therefore be a question of a psychosociological analysis of these explanations and their influences on the future of the students.