Elected Director of the Faculty of Education at the University of Montpellier on December 16, 2021 by the Faculty Council, I took up my post at the start of the 2022 academic year, succeeding Jean-Paul Udave.
I was recruited to the Faculty of Education when it was created in 2013 and to the LIRDEF as a lecturer in French language and literature.
After starting my career as a primary-school teacher in 1986 at the Ecole Normale de Valence, I joined the secondary-school teaching profession in 1992 as a "certifiée" and then "agrégée" in modern literature. From 1996 onwards, I worked as a part-time teacher for MAFPEN, then as a part-time and finally full-time lecturer at the IUFM in Grenoble (Valence site, 1999-2008) and Créteil (Livry-Gargan site, 2008-2013). I defended my thesis in didactics of literature in 2012, in which I questioned the construction of a reader's identity in preparatory classes, under the direction of J.-F. Massol, Université Stendhal Grenoble3.
In 2018, I joined J.-P. Udave's management team to take charge of support for research, innovation, university pedagogy and resource production. In 2019, this mission was complemented by the management of the second-degree continuing education department, to support an evolution of the training engineering missions that were devolved to it towards university pedagogy and resource production.
At the Faculty of Education, my new professional experiences have intersected with a real human adventure through the encounter with a dedicated community, committed to public service education, willing to carry loud and clear the values of emancipatory education.
It was precisely this meeting that prompted me to apply for the position of Director of our Training and Research Unit, in order to pursue the projects initiated by my predecessor and his team, who agreed to follow me. My motivation was reinforced by a number of factors that are worth recalling: the fact that our component is anchored in a major university, with an international outlook, but which is also concerned to preserve territorial balance and the quality of its training courses; its territorial deployment; its recent official recognition as a Training and Research Unit in charge of teacher training, on its own for several courses, in conjunction with the disciplinary components of INSPE's partner universities for others.
These statutory and structuring elements, the strong link between our component and an interdisciplinary research laboratory in didactics, education and training (the LIRDEF), the presence of a historic educational research library (the CEDRHE), and the strong commitment of our staff of all categories make our Faculty a unique model in France, enabling us to pursue our historic missions, but also to create others in the service of education and training in the broadest sense of the terms.
It's now up to us to make our skills and values visible, to maintain and reinforce the quality of our training courses, to make our structure sustainable by stabilizing our training courses and making them attractive, and to develop our capacity to innovate in order to support the environmental and societal transitions of the 21st century without denying our heritage.
It is with this project that I embark on my term of office and the next five years...
Agnès Perrin-Doucey
Director, Faculty of Education