Constructing and Measuring Professional Skills: The Case of Future Teachers Trained in the IUFM

This text deals with the establishment of the IUFM (French teacher training colleges) & the resulting implementation of a professionalization project for teachers. Initially the purpose was to construct new formalized professional knowledge that would extend beyond traditional notions of practical skill or personal qualities. However this project did not lead to any clear identification of what this new knowledge should be. A survey on the "professional test," which was supposed to measure acquisition of the new knowledge, shows in fact that the test remained fairly close to traditional notions of competence. But the conditions inherent in a typically formal situation such as a competitive exam make evaluation of only slightly formalized skills problematic. These tests are observed to discriminate slightly candidates according to mother's level of education, whereas marks received in classical disciplinary-content exams are logically correlated with the candidate's own diploma. In fact, what these "professional" tests favor above all is a relativist attitude toward knowledge. 2 Tables, 40 References. Adapted from the source document.