Problematic of the commons and theories of the common in school didactics of languages-cultures. Essay

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been a striking parallel between the dominant ideas in economics -and more specifically in business management- and the dominant ideas in the school didactics of languages-cultures (SDLC). This essay sets out, for once, to move from observation to projection, by examining the extent to which the transposition of the current economic, but also ideological, debate on "the commons", i.e. shared resources, and "the common", i.e. modes of collective management of these resources, is generating relevant reflections and proposals in this discipline. On the one hand, the question of resources is now posed differently in the SDLC: the Internet gives learners constant and massive access to these resources, digital tools and environments enable them to manipulate them easily, and artificial intelligence programs offer them the possibility, by means of automatic translation, of exploiting documentary resources in L1, L2 or even L2+n, and even of producing their own didactic resources from their queries. On the other hand, training in the responsible and sustainable collective management of these resources has become an important problematic in training for democratic citizenship, an official goal of all Western education systems. This essay draws on two works that represent two opposing conceptions of the commons, one by Elinor Ostrom (2010), winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her pioneering work in Anglo-Saxon commons studies, entitled Gouvernance des biens communs. Pour une nouvelle approche des ressources naturelles (De Boeck, 2010); the other, by a French philosopher and sociologist, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, entitled Commun. Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (La Découverte, 2014), which generated a lot of reactions. The present essay seems to me to show in didactics of languages-cultures (DLC) the relevance of this new "problematic of the commons", and the interest presented by the transposition of the two "theories of the common". Indeed, it allows us to develop a fresh reflection on the long-standing opposition in pedagogy between the "managerial" logic of "empowerment" and the "revolutionary" logic of "emancipation", applied to the current challenge of managing information resources when they are mobilized for common action, both in the micro-society of the classroom, for teaching-learning-using, and in external society, for the active exercise of democratic citizenship.

Available also at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390521905.

Version française disponible: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39010820, 2025d.