Best Paper Award 2017

Abdoulaye Faye’s paper “How Do Teachers React to organizational Change in Education” has taken advantage of the context of the 2016 Secondary School reform in France to consider the agents’ experiences when they have to deal with major organizational changes. 6 teachers from two different schools were interrogated. The research was conducted using qualitative approaches and the results show that, on the one hand, there is a link between the type of administration of the school and the pedagogical staff’s response to the reform. On the other hand, the paper proves that strong institutional injunctions are not sufficient to engage agents into the process of change. It goes on to suggest that such a reform is liable to nonsuccess when it does not keep in view the employees’ need for and conceptions of change as well as their working habits. 

Abdoulaye Faye is a third-year PHD candidate in the Sciences of Education and Training at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, France. His thesis focuses on the analysis of pupils’ classroom activity, especially those who face learning difficulties. His research interests include school dropout, teaching and learning approaches, activity analysis, ethics in research, ethnography in school environments, etc.

He will be attending ERC and ECER 2018 in Bolzano in September.