Conscious and Unconscious Aspects of Teacher-Student Interactions within a High School for Young Adults

Our hypermodern society, focused on knowledge constantly brings new recommendations; the pedagogical field is at the centre of the geopolitical and ideological struggles. These create ambiguities, cleavages and paradoxes that call into question the meaning and existence of the school institution 1. New frameworks arise within the academic system to face an increasingly heterogeneous school, increases in pupil failure and dropout, and so on. With this paper, we will present the outcomes of a three-years research project on school dropouts. We will focus on the impact of the institutional context, namely on how teachers build their professional identity from their interactions with pupils and how those interactions interfere with students’ commitment to academic success. We conducted three narrative interviews per participant with teachers from a high school for young adults, and students from the same school. Teachers’ commitment to students’ academic success is strong, due in part to the particular institutional set-ups such as tutoring and a consistently small number of students in each classroom. This institutional framework favours the relationship between teacher and pupil, which, once established, has a significant impact on how student approach the school, as well as on how they develop their relation to knowledge in particular. Thereby, students are more likely to pursue their schooling because they feel comfortable with and supported by their teachers, as we will discover in their interviews. Beside the positive outcomes from such a framework, we found out that teachers show signs of suffering at the hands of these set-ups, as they don’t feel prepared for such an ‘intense’ involvement in both students’ personal and scholarly lives. The pedagogical act of a teacher is conditioned by one’s subjectivity, the unconscious desire to transmit knowledge, but also by the impact of institutional discourses. The need for teacher of training and supervision is evident and highly recommended.