Représentations sociales de l’approche par les compétences chez les enseignants : cas des instituteurs des écoles primaires publiques de l'arrondissement de Yaoundé 6.

Abstract

It has been for more than two decades now that the competency-based approach (CBA) has been adopted as an educational paradigm in Cameroon. The adoption of this approach comes in response to the many shortcomings of the objectives-based approach, which also preceded another approach. The chain of pedagogical approaches already adopted express the willingness of the Cameroonian education system to find a pedagogical approach adapted to the needs of society. The implementation of the CBA better meets the objectives pursued by the Cameroonian education system. The purpose of this work is to study the social representations of the CBA among teachers. Case of public schools in Yaoundé 6. The latter is part of the field of fundamental teaching in education, precisely Educational Psychology. Our objective is therefore to explore the awareness and knowledge socially shared by education actors vis-à- vis this new innovative approach that comes in a specific context, to see to what extent the beliefs and opinions of its latter would modulate their behavior. We asked ourselves the following research question: What is the list of elements that structure the social representations of the CBA among teachers? How is the CBA known, structured, formed, perceived, lived, judged and represented among teachers? As a temporary answer to these questions, we formulated the following general hypotheses: the lists of elements that structure the social representations of the CBA among teachers are: knowledge, know-how, autonomy and project pedagogy. The justification for this hypothesis lies in the perspective of the structural approach to social representations (Abric, 1994; Flament, 1994). To verify these hypotheses, a qualitative working methodology was adopted based simultaneously on a preinvestigation and subsequent investigations. Data collection was by way of a survey applied to 14 teachers of the EPPA of Foumban. Subsequently, a questionnaire was administered to 40 teachers from two primary schools in the Yaoundé 6 municipality, of which the goal was to build and prioritize the elements that structure the social representations of the CBA among teachers. After data collection, our work was devoted to the presentation of the results of the lexicometric analysis, then will come the results from the prototypical analysis, the similarity analysis will come in third place and finally, the Questioning Analysis. The information collected therefore confirmed our main hypothesis. Nevertheless, the questionnaires also made it possible to understand that the challenges to be met for a true application of the CBA are still important.