This book presents a broad range of research related to how social knowledge is shared, transmitted and transformed in the context of education and professional formation. The chapters of this edited collection reflect different theoretical and empirical approaches to that form of common-sense knowledge called social representations, the theory of which was developed almost a half-century ago by Serge Moscovici. Scholars from various research institutions in Brazil, France and Sweden, spanning a wide variety of disciplines within the social sciences, have contributed chapters that are grouped into three main categories related to education, professionalization and transformation of knowledge. Part I covers theoretical approaches to understanding the transformation of social knowledge from the perspective of social representations. Part II analyzes the impact of the theory of social representations on the transformation of knowledge in the field of education and professional formation. Finally, Part III presents several empirical studies focused on the social and cultural frames that condition the transformation of knowledge. While the book is devoted to education and the emerging field of research on professionalization, it will also appeal to anyone with a general interest in how people acquire their worldviews and how these views influence their actions.

This manual contains overviews on language acquisition and distinguishes between first- and second-language acquisition. It also deals with Romance languages as foreign languages in the world and with language acquisition in some countries of the Romance-speaking world. This reference work will be helpful for researchers, students, and teachers interested in language acquisition in general and in Romance languages in particular.

Resulting from a conference that took place in Amiens, France, in June 2019, this book examines the place and role of objects centered in teaching practices from kindergarten to university, both in the context of France and elsewhere. These “objects for learning” are considered in their physicality as productions, work or signs that are used for learning. They become “objects to learn about” when the object itself is the learning objective. This book offers a cross-disciplinary perspective, linking the different disciplinary fields studied and the many reference sources used by the authors. This two-volume work offers an overview of current research on the subject, with this second volume focusing on objects in representations of space and time, then on learners’ activities in the making or use of objects, before concluding with different cultural and philosophical perspectives on objects

This book addresses current changes of education policies in a context of globalisation. It does so by focusing on the implementation of performance-based accountability policies in France and in Quebec (Canada). It questions the trajectory of these policies, their mediations and their instrumentation in various territories and schools through a theoretical framework which combines a North American neo-institutionalist approach with the perspective of the French sociologie de l’action publique. The book extends the current international literature on English-speaking experiences of hard accountability to research on “soft” accountability policies and proposes a deep investigation in two highly contrasted education systems. This investigation is multilevel and has led to field research both in schools, in intermediate authorities, and in central administrations for three years. The research presented in the book addresses the international literature on accountability in public administration and in education, the current transformations of governance in education, as well as the forms taken by the globalisation of education policies in countries differently exposed to international influences. The comparison highlights a convergent neo-statist trajectory of the performance-based accountability policy in the two countries, various forms of governance by results enacted at the local and meso level, and more intense impacts of these policies on schools and teacher’s practices in Quebec than in France.