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Revue française de pédagogie, n°215/2022

Éducations militantes, formations au militantisme


Revue française de pédagogie - Recherches en éducation



Activist education, activist training

The issues of activism and engagement have particularly captured the attention of sociologists of politics and political scientists, but few studies are devoted to activist training, learning and acquisitions inherent to activist action. Yet, for organisations, activist training meets crucial functional objectives such as the selection of activists, the construction of a framework for identifying and legitimising their action, and the acquisition of knowledge to "equip" them. Activism is often conceived of as a form of schooling per se, but what it teaches is hardly perceptible. In the service of action, the collective is imposed as the beginning and the end of the learning process, and militant knowledge is essentially composite and contingent, because it is inscribed in specific socio-historical contexts.

The aim of this dossier is to grasp the diversity of learning forms produced by activism in a variety of institutions, situations and places where activist education takes place: political parties, a trade union, youth engagement mechanisms, student hostels, the effects of critical pedagogy, student mobilisations. There is still much to understand about militancy training and its aims. This dossier is an invitation to continue the work, to diversify the approaches and perspectives, and to encourage the educational sciences to open up to this theme, which had been previously seldom explored by the discipline.