Teaching practices, inequalities and citizenship in the everyday life of Moroccan schools

• In Event: Education, Social Class and Inequality in the Middle East and North Africa

Proposal

Drawing on a 3-years ethnographical work conducted in a secondary public school in Morocco as part of my PhD thesis, this presentation aims at shedding light on how uncertain teaching practices in the classroom contribute to adolescent and youth processes of citizenship in the neoliberal era. When teaching practices become too precarious, because of fluctuating teacher training, crowded classrooms and unsuitable curricula, students lose interest in the classroom of the public school, whatever their academic level. More than looking at the reproduction of the social order (Bourdieu and Passeron 1972) or the maintenance of an elitist “two-speed social elevator” (Moatassime 1973; Boom 2008) through the mastery of French language, it is the relationship of Moroccan youth with the very idea of citizenship that is at stake in the classroom (Boutieri 2016). For instance, student narratives and practices show that education is more conceived as a career-centred, individualized and isolated experience, instead of a collective experience for learning democracy and solidarity. Thus, adolescent’s narratives and practices to circumvent uncertainties in the classroom come to unsettle traditional projects of social citizenship promoted in the framework of the Moroccan nation-state.

Author

• Ghally Rhannou, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris Sciences et Lettres University