Educational concepts and experiences at the Centre Éducatif Fermé in Paris - France: contributions to a socialist pedagogy in the formation of young offenders

• Grant number: 23/16848-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: February 01, 2025
• End date: January 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal Investigator: Dermeval Saviani
• Grantee: Julio Cesar Francisco
• Supervisor: Gilles Seraphin
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Paris 10), France
• Associated to the scholarship: 22/00610-2 - Critical historical pedagogy: contributions to the formation of adolescents and youths in conflict with the law in the municipalities of São Paulo and Paris, BP.PD

Abstract

The aim of the research project in France is to identify and analyze the conceptions and educational experiences of educators with adolescents aged between 12 and 18 subjected to a socio-educational measure of deprivation of liberty at the Centre Éducatif Fermé in Paris, because of the young people's involvement with criminal experiences. The closed nature of the unit is established by the obligation imposed on the young person to live there, to remain under the permanent supervision of adults and to respect the conditions of socio-educational formation, both school and non-school. The educational personnel of a CEF are made up of 12 to 14 professionals from different areas: specialized educators, monitors, sports educators, technical educators and teachers. The activities that each professional carries out with the youngsters aim to teach them effort, learning, punctuality, respect for the rules, relationships with their peers and with adults. For social work, this means constantly reminding young people about institutional rules, so that they respect the decisions of educators without negotiation and teaching them how to manage any frustrations and develop abilities and competencies for life in freedom. At the end of the socio-educational follow-up, the CEF educators - in collaboration with the open-ended services - must support the young person in building a social integration project. In this context, to achieve the proposed research objective, the methodology takes the form of qualitative research based on the analysis of scientific Marxism, using interviews and observations on the conceptions and educational experiences in which teachers, specialized educators and adolescents are involved. The research is therefore guided by the logic of dialectical materialism in the scientific process, using the following instruments and procedures for data collection: I. in-depth interviews with specialized educators and teachers at the Centre Éducatif Fermé, located in the northern part of Paris (17eme arrondissement); II. in-depth interviews with teenagers about education at the Centre Éducatif Fermé; III. participant observations in the educational practices of the specialized educators and teachers with the adolescents, with the aim of identifying the young people's adherence and resistance to the proposals of institutional education; IV. analysis of the educational work of the French specialized educators and teachers; V. and the elaboration of pedagogical contributions based on the educational experiences analyzed, using the theoretical tools of socialist pedagogies and Dermeval Saviani's. The main hypothesis of the research is that the formation at the Centre Éducatif Fermé opens new possibilities of understanding and action for specialized educators, in a context of reduced schooling and work time for teachers with young people deprived of their liberty, due to voluntarist and pedagogical business activism for the downgraded insertion of offenders into the job market. Finally, the project in France will be supervised by Gilles Séraphin, professor and researcher at the Centre de recherches Éducation et Formation (CREF), at the Université Paris Nanterre.