Mediation at School

Pointing out, along with others, that the School is today faced with the ‘major challenge of normative pluralism,’ which breaks with the school institution of old based on the authority of the Schoolmaster and the vertical transmission of knowledge, O. Kuty, F. Schoenaers, Ch. Dubois et B. Dethier take a look, in a first exploratory study(1), at a new type of actor in the school environment: the ‘mediator.’ Professionals who, according to the researchers, are symbolic of a ‘new cultural attitude,’ that of mediation as a ‘new mode of regulating social links’ and the cement of ‘living together.’

The major appeal of the present work, which its authors see above all as a ‘preliminary report’ on the current state of mediation in the school, lies above all in the impressive corpus of testimonies gathered by Baptiste Dethier, a FNRS doctoral student at the University of Liège’s Centre for Sociological Research and Intervention (CRIS). These interviews, quoted at length, give the floor to these new actors in order to better foreground their own perceptions of the profession. A profession which, still in the process of being institutionalised, seems at the present time to be characterised by a puncturing of meanings, forms and origins.

School mediation, a recent concept

To speak of the emergence, in Belgium, of the notion of school mediation, without tying it explicitly to ‘the weakening of the ‘transcendent’ reference points transmitted by tradition,’ would make little sense. What does that mean, in effect? For the sociologist Olgierd Kuty, a Professor Emeritus at the ULg, the school institution, as was society as a whole up until the turn of the 1980s, was the site of a relative consensus around ‘macro-values’ which were non-negotiable and in a way delivered to citizens in a single block.

‘Amongst these values was to be found the idea that not only was our society marching towards Progress, but that it was led by the major Professions (the priests, the lawyers, the doctors, the scientists) whose superior status stemmed from what they expressed of transcendent values, such as Reason or Revelation, and thus gave meaning to society.’ The members of society thus served, concludes Professor Kuty, ‘as the underlings of values, individuals at the service of values’. In the school context, it was the figure of the Schoolmaster who for a long time embodied these values, values which remained untouched by the actions of human beings. Both in vertically imposing Knowledge and in applying Sanction, without either ever being up for discussion. Heterogeneous individuals who did not fit in with this conception are redirected to the job market.

But from the 1980s onwards our societies entered an epoch marked by the advent of a ‘negotiationary regulation.’ It was the era of the negotiation of values and, even more specifically, micro-values (2). ‘Our era introduced a distinction between, on the one hand, the major values of society […] and on the other the new local micro-values, defined by the ordinary actors and no longer just by professionals. They are negotiated on a local level, in a more horizontal relationship, and are ‘operational’ values, micro-values produced by practice,’ writes Olgierd Kuty. ‘They are defined in the process of debate, in the confrontation of principles. The accent has shifted to the rules of debating.’

The School kept in step with the trend first and foremost. With a background in particular consisting of school standardisation, the evolution of the family structure and the emergence of a ‘teen culture,’ it became – and still remains – the site of a normative pluralism, a cohabitation of different norms, itself a crucible conducive to the emergence of a culture of mediation. ‘Whether they aim at resolving conflicts (in other words restoring social ties) or at preventing them (that is to say preserving social ties), the practices of mediation [...] try to take into consideration diversity (social, ethnic, cultural, etc.) and the plurality of the normative orders which characterise our societies,’ writes Christophe Dubois, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the ULg, in La Mediation Scolaire. The School thus metamorphosed in such a way that it now led to the cohabitation of on the one hand a pedagogical field and on the other hand a ‘social field’, a multi-norm ‘life environment.’ In previous times embedded together, the School’s pedagogical function on the one hand, and the values quite recently shared by teachers and parents on the other (Olgierd Kuty talks of ‘a strategic mother-teacher-priest micro-alliance’), are now distinct. In this context, due to multiple factors which are very well described by Professor Kuty in the present work, ‘the Y and Z generations’ (born between 1980 and today) are in a manner of speaking forcing the School to reinvent itself. In search of a life project and an environment conducive to personal development, they also demand authenticity and immediate gratification, contrary to the old educational models which place the accent on effort and deferred gratification. Often also living in an environment of normative pluralism at home (in a more and more loaded context of a reconstituted family), and ‘in the absence of the former major institutionalised collective life pathways (such as were offered to their parents), the young have to each construct their own life project.’ But, adds Professor Kuty, they nonetheless come up against a school world which is rigid and marked by non-discussion. ‘There are numerous young people who, having grown up and are growing up under the banner of multiple norms, regret the difficulty of having a dialogue within educational institutions which still do not know too well how to adapt to this still new socio-cultural context whilst they continue to grant importance to the experience of the previous generations of teachers, and thus to tradition.’

As will now be clear, it is within this complex framework that mediation intervenes: and it does so in order to, explains Baptiste Dethier, ‘foster the establishment of common norms, and negotiate the process of ‘living together’’ between the school actors who are now ‘in conflict’ due to their normative reference points. It is the pupils and the teachers, certainly, but also the parents who, whilst previously the Family and the School maintained a relationship of cooperation, today greatly challenge the School, ‘taking more and more the side of their children.’ It is thus under the aegis of the school mediator, who embodies ‘a new possibility,’ that social links will be today redefined. ‘It is clear that the School can no longer function as it has done for fifty years,’ concludes Dethier.

First observations

So what does school mediation thus consist of in the Belgian francophone landscape? At the heart of this collective work, the investigation carried out by Baptiste Dethier, founded on a battery of semi-structured interviews (in other words interviews with a flexible structure of themes) with 27 holders of school mediator posts, allows us to discern its contours. And to make a first observation: there has been a considerable boom in mediation services. The largest, the French Speaking Community of Belgium’s School Mediation Service, is double headed: a Brussels section (the SMSB) as well as a Walloon section (the SMSW). The former has some 56 ‘internal’ mediators, in other words each attached to some forty institutions in the Brussels region, whilst the latter has some thirty ‘external’ mediators spread over the different geographical areas of Wallonia and who only intervene on request. Their missions essentially relate to the prevention of violence or the phenomenon of dropping out of school. In the Brussels region there are also ‘local authority mediation services’ active in almost all of the 19 local authorities in the territory. These services are made up of external mediators whose missions are also centred on prevention and information. We will not extend this list any further, which could also have addressed diocesan services and those deployed by the city authorities.

For the sociologist Frédéric Schoenaers, in a chapter in which he addresses Baptiste Dethier’s empirical data, this motley institutional landscape is marked by a significant poly-centrism. ‘Responsibility for mediation is most certainly not taken on by a single actor (a minister for example, or an education and teaching central administrative body) which centralises its organisation and ‘institutional’ definition. On the contrary, since its emergence in the educational domain, several authorities have taken possession of it,’ he writes, stressing their lack of co-ordination. Beyond that, school mediation is also polysemous (plurality of meanings) and polymorphous (plurality of forms). ‘On listening to the professionals working within mediation, you realise that there does not exist a unanimously stable definition shared by everyone of what ‘school mediation’ is.’ There certainly exists a ‘minimal consensus,’ essentially based on the mediator’s neutrality and independence. Nevertheless ‘certain bones of contention observed between mediators for example pitted an exclusively reactive conception of what the definition of mediation should be (response to a singular inter-individual conflict) against a preventative conception (the aim of mediation is to anticipate, through working on detecting problems, a whole series of conflict situations).’ ‘Polymorphism’ for its part concerns a multiplicity of the forms of intervention used by school mediators. Baptiste Dethier explains it in these terms: ‘For certain people, mediation is seen in a quite precise and even traditional manner, in reference to types of more institutionalised mediation (familial, penal). The mediator is thus a neutral third party, independent, and whose job is not to provide solutions but to help people to get along with and listen to each other. For others, on the other hand, mediation is more widely an action devoted to the creation of social bonds, to providing people with support, if not to coaching, and no longer to just conflict management. Finally, others go so far as to state that they do no or very little mediation, and that their professional activity could just as easily have another name, without them agreeing on an alternative.’ In the final analysis the way mediation is disseminated throughout school institutions seems, concludes Frédéric Schoenaers, ‘relatively fragmented. There is fragmentation amongst initiative takers, fragmentation concerning definitions and a fragmentation of professional practices.’

Assessment and prospects

Mediation as an operational system still does not have an acquired legitimacy within the institutions. ‘The reception of mediation is variable and never occurs without some conflict as it brings into question the in principle asymmetrical practices and power relationships between pupil and teacher. This bringing into question, in particular for the adults who are expected to be the ones who implement it, is always difficult. For a school Head Teacher, for example, it involves accepting into his or her school somebody over whom he or she has little or no influence: one can understand that it is difficult, all the more so in that, in practice, the mediators sometimes take on a role that others were fulfilling already. We in any case have observed that mediation obliges the actors of the school world – parents, pupils and teachers – to reposition themselves in relation to each other. In this context, the relationships these people have with the mediators take time to be consolidated,’ explains Baptiste Dethier. And Professor Kuty adds: ‘the mediator arrives on a terrain on which certain actors intend to maintain a function which they consider legitimate. Others, on the other hand, appreciate the evolution. What outcome will this conflict lead to? Let us hope that it goes in the direction of a normative pluralism, thanks to new alliances between the actors of the school world.’ The long chapter by Baptiste Dethier nonetheless brings out the fact, from the mouths of the mediators he has patiently interviewed, that mediation remains relatively well accepted, when all is said and done, in particular by pupils, and meets a need. ‘It provides a remedy to a real suffering in relationships at school, which we could summarise by saying that both the pupils and the teachers feel that they are neither heard nor acknowledged in their respective roles.’ Mediation, apparently in step with a society in which it is practiced today, manages to encourage a relational climate within schools. ‘A doctor one day confided to me that he saw himself as a resources consultant in the life trajectory of the patient,’ adds Olgierd Kuty. ‘This is something other than having the role of instilling standards of conduct and practice. It was an attitude involving making available resources, which the patient however consumes in complete autonomy. There is something of that in the role of the school mediator today.’

In its final pages, the book by Kuty, Schoenaers, Dubois and Dethier, offering thoughts on the next diffusion of mediation in the school world, puts forward the hypothesis of a mediation ‘in a structuring and operationalisation phase,’ beyond the polysemy, polycentrism and polymorphism which characterises it at the moment. ‘Any organisational innovation generally begins with a ‘chaotic’ moment of birth. [...] Actors linked together take possession of a new idea, appropriate it in their own manner and give it a particular consistency without necessarily interacting with each other. It is only subsequently that an action structuring phase comes into being,’ writes Frédéric Schoenaers. It is to the study of this structuring phase and thus the legitimisation of school mediation that Baptiste Dethier will devote part of his doctoral research, which will examine ‘how mediation in schools is made concrete,’ and will raise the question, amongst others, of mediation as a new dimension in teachers’ professional practice.

(1) KUTY O., SCHOENAERS F., DUBOIS Ch., DETHIER B., La médiation scolaire. Un regard des acteurs sur leurs pratiques, Liège, Presses Universitaires de Liège, coll. Essai, 2012.
(2) KUTY Olgierd, La négociation des valeurs. Introduction à la sociologie, Bruxelles, Ed. De Boeck, coll. Ouvertures sociologiques, 2007 (1998).