Conclusion: Rethinking the Collective and the Individual in Education Through Self-Management: A Generalizable Endeavor?

Abstract

Through an analysis of the interdiscursive aspects of the pedagogical practices of the school, I have found that the discourse of LAP tends to polemicize the French state’s neoliberal discourse on education. In the pedagogical practices of LAP I analyzed, the tension between the teachers’ and the students’ agency was revealed. The issue of ‘trust’ between students and teachers in the construction of self-management practices was salient, as some teachers resorted to top-down practices foreclosing the emergence of practices in which students’ agencies could fully develop. Yet, in the Radio LAP events, students were fully able to negotiate and realize the re-centering identity they wanted. Radio LAP participants were able to become the very ‘gatekeepers’ of the re-centering identity they deemed to be relevant, and ‘authentic’, according to the political struggles they choose to belong to and the collective social base these foreground.