Between Discretion and Discredit: Thinking the Materiality of Alternative and Feminist Pedagogies for First-Year Bachelor Sociology Students

This presentation aims to shed light on ways to (re)think the teaching of sociology for first-year undergraduate students, through an approach at the crossroads of feminist pedagogies and popular education, notably the Theatre of the Oppressed. These workshops have been designed to address the needs of new generations of students who enter university with unequal preparation: a growing proportion of working-class children and/or holders of technical baccalaureates marks the arrival of new audiences.

These workshops put into question the conventional and/or dominant forms of knowledge transmission where theoretical abstraction and implicitness are the academic norm, requiring a conceptual and lexical background that can be exclusive. These dialogic workshops aim to create reflective situations that are no longer independent of lived experiences and the associated emotions, nor of the structural power relations in which they are situated. Rethinking these alternative forms of teaching also means accepting the unpredictability of exchanges and reconsidering the pedagogical relationship from both a politicized and politicizing perspective.

Moreover, these pedagogical stances cannot be considered without referencing the frameworks that make them possible. We will also question "academic care" and more broadly the sexual division of academic labor. Indeed, these alternative feminist pedagogical practices are often marginalized both within universities and in the recognition of academic careers, sometimes even discredited. They often involve women at the bottom of the academic ladder and/or in precarious positions, and this discredit harms their careers.

We propose a descriptive audiovisual analysis of the implementation of the workshops (based on a corpus of photographs, audio recordings, and narrative writings from students during first-year university workshops) where the sociological corpus serves as a specific resource for teaching sociology. Additionally, we will present a quantitative analysis articulating a reflective examination of our classroom practice, moving beyond mere experience to theorize actions and experiences.