Theoretical displacement of the notion of ‘relationship to knowledge’ and its possibilities for psycho-pedagogy analysis of school learning

Abstract

This review article discusses the theoretical displacement of the notion of ‘relationship to knowledge’ in its effective use in empirical and theoretical research from different disciplinary fields. In the international academic community there are initiatives from different disciplines that analyzed some problems of knowledge transmission using the heuristic power of the concept of “relationship to knowledge”. These initiatives include theoretical and empirical studies about teacher and students’ relationship with knowledge. These studies are enrolled mainly in two major schools: psychoanalytic of the Centre de Recherche et Formation Education (CREF), University Paris X -Nanterre, created by Jacky Beillerot and continued by Nicole Mosconi and Claudine Blanchard - Laville; and the sociological, the Group “Education, socialization and local communities” (ESCOL) formed in 1987 in the Department of Science Education, University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, under the direction of Bernard Charlot. Efforts to theoretically clarify this “vague, uncertain contours and condition” notion are recorded. Researchers agree that the relationship of a subject with knowledge is constituted in two vital processes, a primary one, linked to the first relationship the child develops in the family. And a secondary process, linked to transit through outbreeding institutions with its own reservoir of meanings, operating logics and demands at the subject, appear to be chance or opportunity to move, modify or strengthen this relationship. The investigations differ in the dimensions of analysis that emphasize: the studies that are part of the ESCOL will do in the sense that subjects built around knowledge, and by extension, school, in general. The studies are part of the development of CREF, meanwhile, will give priority to certain phenomena of unconscious order: transference phenomena, phantasmic and even instinctual. What is apparent is the persistence of a theoretical – epistemological problem: how are the subjectivity, the knowledge and the relationship established between they conceptualized?