Harry Potter: mirroring the crisis/la crise dans le miroir

Harry Potter: mirroring the crisis

Reflectiveness, conflicts and exploring complexity in the work of J. K. Rowling and how it lives on through games, reading and FanLit in schools and in private

12 to 13 November 2008

Organisers

Nicole BIAGIOLI and the I3D Research team (Interdidactique et discours des disciplines) of the IUFM Célestin Freinet-Académie de Nice

Venue: Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres Célestin Freinet – Académie de Nice-Université de Sophia Antipolis, Centre George V

89 avenue George V, 06046 Nice Cedex 1, France

Duration: two days.

Closing date for submissions in response to the final call for papers

17 September 2008 [Lire l'appel à contribution en français]

Send the outline of your proposed paper (abstract of 500 to 800 words maximum with four keywords) no later than 17 September 2008 by email to:

Nicole.BIAGIOLI@unice.fr

The style sheet can be downloaded from the colloquium website:

http://www.iufm.unice.fr/colloqueHarryPotter/index.html

Authors will be informed whether their paper has been accepted or not by 27 September 2008.

Colloquium languages: French, English.

Partners

For the advertising and organisation of the colloquium and the publication of the proceedings:

- CTEL (Centre de recherche Transdisciplinaire en Epistémologie de la littérature, EA1758), Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis),

- Institut International Charles Perrault

- AIRDF (Association Internationale de recherche en didactique du français),

- IRSCL (International Research Society for Children's Literature).

Scientific Committee

Eric Auriacombe (Paris), Sandra L. Beckett (Brock University, Ontario,Canada), Pierre Bruno (Université de Bourgogne), Françoise Demougin (IUFM, Université de Montpellier 2) Anne Jorro (Université de Toulouse 2), Marlène Lebrun (IUFM, Université d'Aix-Marseille), Jean Perrot (Emeritus Professor Paris 13), Natividade Pires (Universidade Castelo Branco, Portugal), Isabelle Smadja; and, from the I3D team (IUFM Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis): Nicole Biagioli, Béatrice Bomel-Rainelli, Alice De Georges Métral, Jean-Philippe Drouhard, Jean-Jacques Legendre, René Lozi, Marie-Louise Martinez, Frédéric Torterat.

Steering committee

I3D team, communications department of the IUFM.

Theme of the colloquium

Cultural psychology (J. Bruner) has shown how fiction impacts on the structuring both of individuals and of societies. It plays an active role in the development and transmission of knowledge by making it possible to compare and contrast them. That is why it is important to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to analysing fiction, drawing on the sciences of literature and the social and educational sciences.

The Harry Potter “phenomenon” does not only concern adolescents but extends to readers of all generations, in a world where cultural products are the subject of a globalised mass media. In the same way as Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince can be said to appeal to the inner child locked up inside each adult (Biagioli 2001), it can be argued that Harry Potter speaks to the inner schoolchild within each adult, the vehicle for, and subject of, school-related fantasies connecting them to the social institution as a whole. The characters have grown up alongside their first readers and have been part of their lives from childhood to pre-adulthood. So there really is a Harry Potter generation whose perception of society and of school has been punctuated by the regular publication of the books and film releases. But the intercultural ambitions of J. K. Rowling's project have also changed reading habits, with readers appropriating the novel interactively, through games. Communities of readers, players and FanLit writers have formed, establishing rites and rituals for their meetings and exchanges. At the end of the year of publication of the last volume, we will review this initial period of the novel's life along with all the approaches it has spawned.

Proposed avenues of study

The impact of J. K. Rowling's series on symbolic practices, social behaviour and learning will be studied and analysed from three disciplinary standpoints:

1 The sciences of literature and of the media

Tentacle-like, Harry Potter represents the intersection of genres and readerships, cultural globalisation, youth, the print medium and its offshoots (films, merchandising products, websites, specialist press), translation issues.

The reader's identification with the characters and the perturbation/disorientation created by the comparison with their own universe creates a symbolic mirror: mirror structures and mirrors in the work, the recycling of myths and stereotypes. The writing of Harry Potter: humour, rhythm(s), description, poetry, narration (voices, focuses).

Reading of Harry Potter ploughed back into games and writing: do readers play and write alone or in groups? How faithful or inventive are they in relation to the novel? What is the make-up of the games communities? What are the rules and outcomes of the game? What are the players' and FanLit writers' expectations and what do they gain?

2 Social sciences and anthropology

How does the novel transpose the very contemporary crisis affecting institutions (the family, school, state, prison, the economy, sport), in an exhaustive manner, with reference to the situation in Britain, in Europe and globally? What are the aims and standpoints?

The issue of identity in relation to otherness is central in the work's “teaching”. What is the place of biological and intellectual kinship in the protagonists' construction of their identity? What is the place of institutions? Friendship versus boyfriend/girlfriend? What are the various identity-creation models presented through the fiction: hybrid, fragmented, mixed-race, multiple?

How does the social split between Muggles and Wizards relate to current social divisions?

3 Educational sciences and subject didactics

Hogwarts is a training academy. What light can the educational sciences and subject didactics shed on teaching/learning models, orientation, student training and assessment, teacher training and assessment, theories of education and the status of the various subjects (pre-scientific, para-scientific, scientific) described in the novel.

J. K. Rowling is a former teacher; the student's relationship to the subjects taught in developing his/her personal ambition is one of the narrative's essential driving forces. How have teachers seized on the novel and incorporated it as a teaching resource, an educational object, and in what subjects? What have researchers discovered about the relationship between pupils' private reading and their experience of school. Comparative portrayals of subjects by the teachers and by the students based on extracts from the novel and their impact on learning. The afternoon of Wednesday 12 will be dedicated to sharing classroom practices based on or around Harry Potter.

Team I3D

The “Interdidactique et discours des disciplines” research team investigates phenomena associated with the coexistence of core educational subjects. It is spearheading two avenues of research, one on the place of the subjects in the teaching offered to students, and in the teacher's own training; the other on representations of the subjects by culture and society as a whole.

We carried out a preliminary study based on the Harry Potter series analysing representations of school, followed by an international study (over 3,500 responses). The studies reveal readers' culture and how they represent schools in their imaginations according to age, sex, nationality, level of studies, family background and parents' occupation. The books also provided us with the background material for interdidactic sessions during which multidisciplinary primary school teachers, and teachers of different subjects at secondary school, set the students activities designed to create awareness of the differences between the discourses, practices and notions of mother tongue, foreign languages, Latin, sciences, physical education and sports, etc.

The colloquium venue

This austere neo-Gothic building is the work of the architect Adrien Rey, who also built the very different, neo-classical-style Chamber of Commerce in Nice. The foundation stone was laid in 1896, and the building was inaugurated by Monsignor Henri Chapon, Bishop of Nice, on 19 March 1898. Nices's first ever seminary, it was built specifically to house future priests, confined until then in a monastery in the old town. The state expropriated the Church in 1905 and the seminarists were replaced by trainee male, and later female, primary school teachers. Later the establishment became the École Normale de filles with the addition of “écoles d'application” (primary teacher education laboratory schools), where the prospective primary school teachers did their teaching practice. The conversion to a single-sex establishment diverted the building from its designated purpose for a short period until the introduction of the Instituts de Formation des Maîtres (university-based teacher training colleges) in 1993 restored it to its original vocation: initial training.

This brief history is almost a fable, in which schools succeeded the Church not only in its educational role and in people's minds, but also the buildings have changed hands too.

So it is not just the school's external resemblance to J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts that incited the young pupils in the teaching practice classes to play at Harry Potter on the staircases and in the corridors, it is also because, from the start, the magic of school has reigned here.

For further information, contact

Nicole Biagioli

+33 (0)4 93 53 75 50

Nicole.BIAGIOLI@unice.fr

Communications department of the IUFM Célestin Freinet-Académie de Nice

+33 (0)4 93 53 75 48

Emmanuelle.DUCHEZ@unice.fr