Universitatea „Cuza“ organizează o gală prin care îşi premiază studenţii
Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza“ organizează joi, 23 mai, un eveniment care are ca scop recunoaşterea rezultatelor obţinute de studenţii universităţii pe parcursul anului universitar 2017 - 2018.
„Gala Studentului UAIC 2019“ va avea loc în Sala Senatului, începând cu ora 16.30, iar la gală vor participa studenţii care vor fi premiaţi, reprezentanţi ai conducerii UAIC, decanii celor 15 facultăţi, dar şi studenţii reprezentanţi în Senatul universităţii. „Pe lângă premierea rezultatelor obţinute de studenţi, acest demers vizează şi prevenirea abandonului universitar, care înregistrează o creştere în rândul universităţilor din România. Astfel, studenţii senatori au propus organizarea acestui eveniment şi ca o motivaţie pentru studenţi de a se implica şi a se dedica activităţilor didactice şi de cercetare“, au precizat reprezentanţii UAIC. În mod concret, vor fi recunoscute şi promovate, susţin cei de la „Cuza“, meritele studenţilor de pe parcursul anului universitar, fiind şi o măsură prin care se încearcă prevenirea abandonului universitar prin oferirea de exemple de succes.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași și Bună Ziua Iași
Conferinţe de excepţie la Festivalul Internaţional al Educaţiei
Vedete de renume vizitează Iaşul în această săptămână * este vorba de jurnalistul Andrei Voiculescu (Radio Europa Liberă), de Ovidiu Lipan Ţăndărică, de prezentatorul TV Dan Negru şi, nu în ultimul rând, de actriţa Maia Morgenstern
Festivalul Internaţional al Educaţiei - ediţia a VII-a - 2019 include în program două conferinţe motivaţionale susţinute de invitaţi de excepţie. Astfel, pe 23 mai, între orele 4.30 şi 16.30, are loc conferinţă susţinută de jurnalistul Andrei Voiculescu (Radio Europa Liberă) şi artistul Ovidiu Lipan Ţăndărică. Conferinţa va fi moderată de Dan Negru. De asemenea, pe 25 mai, între orele 12.00 şi 14.00, are loc conferinţă susţinută de actriţa Maia Morgenstern. Ambele conferinţe vor avea loc în Aula Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare „Mihai Eminescu” din Iaşi.
Jurnalistul Andrei Voiculescu (nepotul scriitorului Vasile Voiculescu) a început în 1975 să lucreze la Radio Europa Liberă, secţia în limba română, ca prezentator şi redactor muzical, în timpul carierei sale modelând generaţii de artişti şi jurnalişti prin stilul şi calitatea programelor sale de radio.
La rândul ei, renumita actriţă de teatru şi film Maia Morgenstern a realizat de-a lungul carierei roluri notabile pe scena de teatru, fiind cunoscută şi pentru rolurile din filme de succes ca „Balanţa”, „Cel mai iubit dintre pamânteni” sau „Patimile lui Hristos”. Actriţa a primit Ordinul Artelor şi Literelor în grad de Cavaler (Franţa, 2012) şi Ordinul Naţional “Pentru Merit” în grad de Mare Ofiţer (România, 2018).
În fine, cunoscutul muzician, compozitor şi baterist român Ovidiu Lipan Ţăndărică, născut la Iaşi, a făcut parte din celebrele trupe „Roşu şi Negru” şi „Phoenix”, s-a implicat mereu în proiecte muzicale noi, abordând genuri muzicale diverse – de la rock la jazz, de la etno la pop balcano, de la pop la rock simfonic.
Festivalul Internaţional al Educaţiei, proiect cultural-educativ al Primăriei Municipiului Iaşi, cuprinde la fiecare ediţie un mix de evenimente: muzică, expoziţii, carte, film, operă, teatru, educaţie, cu adresabilitate către toate categoriile de public. Acestea sunt fie evenimente individuale, fie festivaluri de sine stătătoare care valorifică atât spaţiile convenţionale, cât şi pe cele alternative, într-un mod cât mai creativ, inovativ şi valoros.
Publicație: Evenimentul
Oxford University must become more diverse. But we’re already on the right path
The university’s new initiatives to widen access to under-represented students are a welcome sign of progress
Varaidzo Kativhu is a second-year Oxford University undergraduate with a personal YouTube following of about 26,000 subscribers. An early episode of her weekly bulletins describing her time at university dealt with the issue of whether Oxford is diverse.
“No, no, flat out no,” she said as emphatically as she could. But she also told her viewers: “It is your job to make Oxford diverse.” In other words, “Do what I did: apply to study here and be part of the change.”
Vee, as she prefers to be known, has certainly done that. She’s an excellent student in classical archaeology and ancient history, and has done a stellar job of persuading others from non-traditional backgrounds to have a go at Oxford. In addition to her videos, she has run her own workshops, visited schools – and even been invited to Downing Street, and met Michelle Obama.
But Vee’s educational story is not quite straightforward. Her father died when she was young. Brought up by her mother, a mental health nurse, she moved from Zimbabwe to live in the West Midlands at seven years old, learning English as she went. She worked hard at her comprehensive school, gaining three good grades at A-level – but probably not quite enough to make a competitive application to Oxford.
How, then, did she make it? By being accepted as one of the first cohort to Lady Margaret Hall’s foundation year, which launched in October 2016. She was one of 11 students who kicked off a pioneering scheme to take young people with great potential but whose backgrounds had included considerable obstacles to learning.
Those obstacles are well known. A student from an area of economic deprivation is 27% less likely to score five A* to C grades at GCSE. There will be a similar pattern at A-level. Her school is 70% more likely to have high teacher turnover. All this is established. The policy question for universities is how to measure – and balance – potential against past attainment.
Oxford’s admissions system does try to give some context to each application in order to create a more level playing field. But the metrics of disadvantage are notoriously patchy, and it’s no secret that the university’s attempts to improve social mobility have not in the past moved the needle to a significant degree.
But Oxford is changing. The university is today announcing two major initiatives to make sure that more young people from under-represented backgrounds can find their way to the university. One is a foundation year – Foundation Oxford – which will, like the LMH pilot project, give intensive additional help to help students achieve all they could if they had come from a more economically secure background.
The other initiative – Opportunity Oxford – is based on an enterprising parallel experiment launched by Ivor Crewe at University College for students who need additional support to transition successfully from school to Oxford. The aim of expanding these two programmes is to ensure that a quarter of Oxford undergraduates will, by 2023, come from the UK’s most under-represented backgrounds.
Oxford’s record on social mobility is probably not as bad as you think it is. Research commissioned by the university a couple of years ago showed some wild misconceptions about who gets a place: some respondents thought that 95% of undergraduates went to private school. That’s wrong by about 60 percentage points (64.5% of offers went to state school pupils), as new figures for 2019 admissions will shortly show, even if the true figure is still some way out of line with the national average of the number of pupils going to state v private schools – only about 6% of the UK population go to private school.
But there is common agreement that Oxford has to do better. The university’s decision to be more proactive in releasing granular data about admissions means there is no longer anywhere to hide. Colleges or subjects that are not doing their best to admit a more diverse pool of candidates will find themselves having to explain why – to alumni and to the regulator.
LMH’s own scheme was based on a 20-year project at Trinity College Dublin, the impressive Trinity access programme. Data there shows that – with the help of a foundation year – students from low socio-economic status groups eventually perform just as well as more traditional applicants. Our own pilot project is only three years old, but we are finding the same. We have so far had 100% retention on course. Seventy per cent of the first two years matriculated as full undergraduates at Oxford.
Vee and her contemporaries from the first cohort are, as a group, performing in line with their peer group. All the students who didn’t, in the end, go on to study at Oxford received Russell Group offers, and say they benefited from the year they spent honing their academic skills.
It’s clear that creating a more level admissions playing field is not dumbing down, but helping up. Bridging and foundation years are powerful tools in allowing extraordinarily talented and committed young people to have an Oxford education. A commitment to social mobility doesn’t have to be in tension with excellence: quite the opposite.
Building on innovative experiments at individual colleges has taken some determination from three individuals – Prof Maggie Snowling, president of St John’s College, pro vice chancellor Martin Williams, and the vice chancellor, Prof Louise Richardson herself – to help change the weather across the university. Cambridge has announced it’s going to try a similar scheme.
Oxford can and should do more, but it’s now on a path to greater inclusion. Vee and her peers had few illusions about the nature of the Oxford they were joining. But they still came, they felt welcome, and they are now encouraging others to come.
LMH already looks and feels different: we have benefited immensely from the more than 30 students (nearly 10% of our annual intake) we’ve had so far on our foundation year. And now, with expanded schemes and a real commitment at the centre, significant change across Oxford looks certain to happen.
Publicație: The Guardian
AI tutors will make mass retraining a viable reality
Artificial intelligence may be threatening employment but it could also be key to helping humans find alternative jobs, argues Shigeru Miyagawa
It is commonly agreed that automation will take over large numbers of existing jobs over the next generation, requiring humans to train and retrain for new but different roles.
We can already see this happening. College graduation rates are increasing across all Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and one-third of this increase is accounted for by adults aged between 25 and 34, who are already likely to be working. Many will be taking online courses; even in a country such as Japan, in which the college-age population is declining, enrolment is expanding on the few fully online programmes available.
There is no shortage of high-quality higher education material available online: this movement began in 2001 with MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which today has material from 2,400 MIT courses and is accessed monthly by 2 million unique users. And such material is drawn on by the burgeoning number of massive open online courses, which allow students to learn just about anything. According to Mooc search engine Class Central, last year saw 101 million learners worldwide studying 11,400 Moocs offered by 900 universities.
There are AI programmes that can guide you through the myriad offerings fro some topics and find the appropriate set for your needs. But what about once you enrol? One well-known problem with Moocs is their high attrition rate, especially in the first weeks. To offer the best online learning experience, high-quality content clearly isn’t enough.
Learners tend to only passively engage with online content, while effective education requires active learning. This is borne out in a recent study by an MIT undergraduate, who found that those who stayed the course on a Mooc on modern Japanese history became increasingly active on the course’s online discussion forum.
Armed with this knowledge, I approached a colleague in MIT’s AI Lab, Boris Katz, to collaborate on a 24/7 AI tutor for Moocs using the system for answering natural language questions that he had already developed. The software, called START, converts the question into a semantic representation (common for all wording variations), which is used to search the web or whatever other source we point it towards, to come up with, ideally, one correct answer.
Our team annotated the video lectures such that if the answer to their question can be found in one of them, the student is taken directly to it. The answers to more general questions are retrieved via general web sources, such as Wikipedia infoboxes.
The effort involved in creating even this simple prototype was enormous. But as we learn to automate more of the tasks, such as annotation, the effort will diminish. And it will pay off: automatically dealing with Moocs’ basic knowledge content will allow interhuman discussion to focus on higher-level issues.
It is also important for the future workforce to acquire effective communication skills. One way is to get students to write clear, logical essays, but these are difficult to mark at scale. One solution that has been used since the early Moocs is peer grading, but it has met with mixed results. One informal test found that peers tend to be overly generous, mostly giving As. However, an AI marker assigned the same small set of essays a range of grades with a similar distribution to those given by human teaching assistants.
The problem is that setting up an AI essay grading system effectively is also quite complex because it needs to be fed all the course reading materials and lecture notes to ensure that it is grading in the context of the course’s full knowledge base. The instructor’s rubrics must also be fed in and weighted accordingly.
However, again, greater automation could make AI essay grading a reality, bringing online learning one step closer to meeting the needs of learners in ways that are only currently possible in face-to-face contexts.
We still have some way to go before we can implement AI systems in real time. But, ultimately, the goal of large-scale, affordable, lifelong learning will become a reality.
Publicație : The Times
Does the Brexit ‘shitshow’ emanate from ‘elite’ education?
Plenty on the Continent see a link between Brexit and English educational hierarchy, writes John Morgan
“Brexit is a big shitshow,” said Michael Roth, Germany’s Europe minister, a few weeks back. He traced the “shitshow” back to a particular orifice: Britain’s (or more accurately, England’s) education system.
Roth, a Social Democrat, accused “90 per cent” of the British Cabinet of having “no idea how workers think, live, work and behave” and said it would not be those UK politicians “born with silver spoons in their mouths, who went to private schools and elite universities that will suffer the consequences of the mess”, according to Bloomberg’s report.
As Brexit unfolds, or unravels, friends on the Continent are pointing out that England’s fondness for “elite” education may be a contributing factor. But curiously, few politicians or commentators on this island are doing the same.
A week before Roth’s comments, I had spoken with a senior figure at a Dutch university who had watched with fascination the episode of the BBC’s Inside Europe documentary focusing on Brexit and the genesis of David Cameron’s decision to hold the European Union referendum – a decision driven by the prime minister’s concerns about the threat to his Conservative Party from the hard-right Eurosceptic party Ukip.
The documentary reaffirmed to him “how irresponsible Cameron and others” in the ruling Conservative leadership had been. He put this down to Britain being “a society with classes” and to the fact that, for politicians such as Cameron and Boris Johnson (who both attended Eton College and the University of Oxford) “it’s a game; because they are safe…they don’t care. They are not thinking in a responsible way about the impact for society.”
A few months before that, I had heard a continental European expert on higher education argue, at a London event, that Brexit had exposed the myth of the superior quality of Oxford and Cambridge by exposing the incompetence of the governing class they train.
And Der Spiegel journalist Jan Fleischhauer wrote of Brexit: “Almost everyone who has had a say in this adventure seems to belong to the British establishment, meaning they went to an outrageously expensive private school and completed their studies at Cambridge or Oxford. What in the name of God do they teach them?”
England’s approach to higher education must indeed look very odd from the perspective of the leading university systems on the Continent.
In Germany, universities are non-selective in admission by comparison with English counterparts (with the exception of high-demand courses). LMU Munich president Bernd Huber, who leads an institution that has 50,000 students yet is internationally respected, told me in 2016 that in Germany “it’s not so important which university you have attended…You can say very roughly if you do an undergraduate degree you will get a very good education at every university in Germany.”
Similarly in the Netherlands, I heard how completion of the post-high school diploma earns students the right to enrol at university, selection is used in admissions only to courses where demand exceeds the number of places (11 per cent of courses last year) and there is a pride in maintaining high standards across all of the nation’s universities.
In neither Germany nor the Netherlands is it necessary for senior politicians to have attended particular universities. To give a very rough impression: the last six Dutch prime ministers attended six different universities; the last four German chancellors attended four different universities.
The question of whether, and how, England’s contrasting, extreme social hierarchy of education has helped to breed its political and social discontents receives scant attention on this side of the Channel.
In analysis of the Brexit vote in the UK, being a graduate, or a non-graduate, is understood to be one of the key determining factors in support for Remain or Leave – but in a blunt way that elides the social and economic differences within both those groups.
The Labour MP Gloria De Piero has written thoughtfully about her conversations with Leave voters in her Leave-voting constituency of Ashfield in Nottinghamshire – and particularly how frustration over lack of access to education, and resentment of those with access to education, was a recurring theme. But attempts to gain such insights are rare.
The historian David Kynaston, co-author of a recent book on private schools and inequality, has suggested that the “ongoing Brexit disaster” means we now see our privately educated rulers as “a caste of privileged and entitled men (occasionally women) with necessarily only limited understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life (including state education) as lived by most people”. As yet, there’s not much evidence of this in the political debate initiated by Brexit.
In France, Emmanuel Macron has reacted to the gilets jaunes movement and the resentment over inequality it expresses by moving to abolish the École Nationale d’Administration, the civil service training institute that is the closest thing to an Oxbridge-style, socially exclusive feeder for the political elite to be found on the Continent.
There’s plenty of debate over whether Macron’s move is anything more than cosmetic – but it’s notable that he sees remedying educational inequality (or at least a visible gesture towards that) as a way to respond to anger about social inequality.
Brexit has exposed damaging social fractures in Britain. We are often told that this is an “anti-elitist” political moment, in which public trust in our political, financial and media elites is collapsing.
Will the moment come when public trust in the vertiginous educational hierarchy that produces those elites collapses as well?
Publicație : The Times
Priyamvada Gopal: on the front line of Britain’s imperial past
The literature expert on online abuse, decolonising the curriculum and Cambridge’s role in the slave trade
“Even the mildest of criticism and it’s just Armageddon.” These are the words of Priyamvada Gopal, reader in anglophone and related literatures at the University of Cambridge, describing her experiences on social media and beyond.
Since she is both Asian and a woman, she is often subjected to savage abuse when speaking out about politics, race and education. Yet the worst, she told Times Higher Education, comes when she has a go at privileged, white and male “cult figures” such as Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. “Their followers set off mob attacks, which they then accuse others of doing to them,” she said. “I got parallel abuse criticising Hindu nationalism in India. Systematic trolling armies are unleashed,” hurling rape as well as death threats, said Dr Gopal.
What the two cases had in common, in Dr Gopal’s view, was “men in power using narratives of majority victimhood to entrench themselves and turning it against their detractors”. Furthermore, the basic story that “there are majorities imperilled by minorities” was itself “a narrative put in place by empire”.
Based in Britain since 2001, Dr Gopal was hired by Cambridge to teach south Asian and other international writing and “for many years didn’t talk or write about the empire at all”. In 2006, however, as she describes in her forthcoming book Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, she took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. There she found herself confronted by “the media face of the case for British imperialism, Niall Ferguson” and was a largely lone voice in challenging his “bullish assertions about the greatness of Britain’s imperial project and the benevolence of its legacies”.
It was this experience – and the limited level of knowledge that students bring to her classes – that alerted Dr Gopal to “a huge gap in discussions of the empire”.
Since her confrontation with Professor Ferguson, she believes that there have been further signs of more sympathetic attitudes to empire returning. This could be seen, for example, in the “balance sheet approach” adopted by academics such as Nigel Biggar, Regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford. “To say, we appropriated the land, and, yes, there were some massacres and racial hierarchy, but look at the railways,” as she put it, “strikes me as the most inappropriate way to approach historical events in their complexity.” “The empire was meant to create wealth and appropriate labour and land. If you don’t think about it in those ways, it makes no sense. That is constitutive,” Dr Gopal said.
Dr Gopal’s new book sets out to celebrate the political agency of colonised peoples, its importance in bringing an end to empire and the impact it had on metropolitan liberal and radical thinking. She shows how there was always opposition to empire within the UK and how the anti-imperial struggle forged productive, if often tense, partnerships between activists from Britain and colonised countries.
On today’s debates about decolonising the curriculum, Dr Gopal stressed that “there’s a very clear difference between diversity and decolonisation”. “Just having me lecture on Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, that’s not going to decolonise the department,” she said.
“We know that English literature [as a discipline] was conceived of as producing English identity in the crucible of empire...Decolonisation is about bringing the question of empire back on the table and saying: what are the multifarious ways in which it has affected how we think, what we teach and who we regard as great, and the ways in which we read and do or do not contextualise the emergence of those texts?” She had also been led to reflect on her own teaching, given that “the authors I taught from India were largely upper-caste Hindus”.
In her classroom, Dr Gopal has witnessed many students “turning from relatively bland well-meaning people who were open-minded but not especially aware to people who think quite sharply and passionately about issues in the course of a term or two. I have seen them become very critical thinkers.”
Thus, Cambridge’s move to initiate an inquiry into its relationship with slavery was “put on the table” by students, in Dr Gopal’s view.
Heartened “that the inquiry is going to think about Cambridge’s contribution to race science and the racial thinking that underpins slavery”, Dr Gopal would like to see it lead to an acknowledgement that “certain communities and countries carry the blight [of] the legacies of appropriation” and money “put towards a modest acknowledgement of what happened”.
Such funds could, for example, be used to “facilitate more non-traditional black students – I’m not saying BAME [black, Asian and minority ethnic], I mean black students – coming to Cambridge. But you can also make reparations at the level of representation: we have one black faculty member and she is international and not black British, though Asians are very well represented. That is a reparation that can be made as a policy decision without any extra money.”
Publicație : The Times
German university’s London campus will ‘send anti-Brexit signal’
Technical University of Munich outpost may be joint venture with Imperial College London
A German university is planning to open a campus in London “to send a signal against this crazy Brexit”.
Wolfgang Herrmann, president of the Technical University of Munich, told Times Higher Education that the new outpost would either be a sole TUM venture or a joint enterprise with Imperial College London.
Last October, the two universities formed a “flagship partnership”, with the aim of forging research links, developing student exchanges and exploring new partnerships with industry.
Professor Herrmann said he wanted TUM to capitalise on the “outstanding science, technology and business” in London, but added that opening a London site would also be a political statement.
“We as a university definitely want to set up in London because we believe in the future of this wonderful metropolis in the middle of Europe,” he said.
“At the same time, we want to send a signal against this crazy Brexit development. But irrespective of the [Brexit] outcome, we will continue our plans of settling in London, no doubt.”
Professor Herrmann said that the London site would host both teaching and research activities and would be modelled on TUM’s branch campus in Singapore, which opened in 2002 and involves partnerships with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.
“Certainly there must be programmes that do not interfere with our partner Imperial College but add new strengths to their activities and maybe vice versa, if we do a joint venture,” he said.
TUM also has several offices around the world, including one in Mumbai and one in Beijing.
But Professor Herrmann said that while the university has been active in Asia over the past 20 years, it was now “refocusing on Europe”.
“That does not mean that we abandon China…but we noticed that we shouldn’t forget Europe. It’s our homeland,” he said.
He added that he “experienced the growing of a new, peaceful Europe” after the Second World War and saw “how much we all gained from this community [and] from European unity”.
Professor Herrmann said the London campus would be a “small contribution” to show that this unity “can be continued in the future”.
“I think it would be disastrous [if] Europe falls apart…One has to do something to keep it together.”
Speaking about TUM’s partnership with Imperial, Professor Herrmann said the institutions had “almost exactly the same portfolio of disciplines”.
“There are hardly any two universities in Europe that are more similar with regards to portfolio. So we are ideal partners,” he said. “Imperial College very much likes our entrepreneurial activities. We like its strengths in things like artificial intelligence.”
An Imperial spokesman said its “research, education and innovation ties [with TUM] will continue to grow as we explore new ways to increase the impact of what we do together”.
Last year, Imperial launched a partnership with the French National Centre for Scientific Research to ensure its continued access to continental research funding after Brexit.
Publicație : The Times
First the worst? Lead authors ‘should take misconduct blame’
Holding ‘probably innocent’ co-authors responsible for research wrongdoing cannot be justified, say academics
First authors should be held accountable for scientific misconduct in their papers unless it can be proven that they were not responsible, academics have argued.
Guidelines produced by scholarly societies typically suggest that authors should be directly accountable only for the work they contribute to articles, or that all contributors should be held equally culpable.
However, some major players in scientific publishing, including the American Psychological Association and the BMJ, have adopted a guarantor model. Katrin Hussinger, professor of strategy and organisation at the University of Luxembourg, and Maikel Pellens, visiting professor in entrepreneurship at Ghent University, argued that this should be adopted more widely after conducting a study that found that first authors were much more likely to be behind research malpractice.
Analysing the results of 80 misconduct investigations conducted by the US Office of Research Integrity between 1993 and 2014, covering 184 publications, first authors were 38 per cent more likely to be responsible for wrongdoing than authors listed in the middle of the byline. In biomedicine, first authors typically came up with the original idea for the study and did most of the experimental work. Corresponding authors were 14 per cent more likely to be to blame, according to a paper published in Plos One this month.
Last authors – typically the most senior member of the team, with a general oversight role – were slightly more likely to be at fault, while middle authors – also known as contributing authors – were significantly under-represented among the wrongdoers.
Professor Hussinger told Times Higher Education that there should be a “guarantor-type model that holds principal authors ex ante accountable for misconduct, given that they have the best knowledge of the essence of the project and the highest incentives to commit or to prevent misconduct”.
Such a model would “still capture the responsible author in the majority of cases” while “avoiding a large part of the social cost of stigmatisation” by not involving “probably innocent” co-authors, Professor Hussinger said.
“In effect, it focuses ex ante accountability on those authors who are most likely to actually commit misconduct,” said Professor Hussinger.
She added: “If evidence surfaces that another author is responsible for misconduct, that author should of course be held accountable.”
Publicație : The Times
Compagnons du devoir, artisans du savoir
Reconstruire Notre-Dame de Paris en cinq ans ? Un pari et un défi que se sentent prêtes à relever les organisations compagnonniques qui forment charpentiers, couvreurs, tailleurs de pierre…
Là-haut, Tom le funambule évolue entre ciel et terre. A 16 ans, le jeune homme a quitté le sol d’un collège et son statique tableau noir pour arpenter les toits entre cheminées et gouttières. « J’aime la hauteur et les choses fines », raconte-t-il. Alors, le chemin à prendre se dessine : devenir couvreur et se former auprès d’une association compagnonnique pour s’initier aux difficultés du métier.
En première année de CAP couvreur au sein du centre de formation des Compagnons du devoir et du tour de France de Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Tom a vu, le 15 avril, comme des millions de Français, la toiture de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris disparaître, dévorée par un incendie. Il a vu s’écrouler la flèche néogothique de Viollet-le-Duc. Alors que la plupart des Français marquaient un moment de sidération, les compagnons charpentiers, tailleurs de pierre et couvreurs pensaient déjà à relever l’édifice. Le jeune apprenti n’a pas fait exception. Il se voit bien, lors de son tour de France à accomplir, faire halte sur les bords de la Seine au chevet de Notre-Dame pour reconstruire, « au plus proche de l’ancien ».
Dès le lendemain du sinistre, le président de la République, Emmanuel Macron, a déclaré vouloir que la reconstruction du plus visité des monuments français « soit achevée d’ici cinq années » – pour les Jeux olympiques de 2024. « Possible », répondent les compagnons interrogés, dès lors qu’on ne reconstruit pas à l’identique. « Nous avons toutes les compétences pour reconstruire la charpente quel que soit le matériau choisi », assure Bastien Lassonnerie, compagnon du devoir et du tour de France et prévost du centre de formation de Villeneuve-d’Ascq, dit « Lyonnais la Vaillance » (chaque membre d’une organisation reçoit ou adopte un nom de compagnon).
Trois organisations compagnonniques travaillent à former les ouvriers et artisans de demain : l’Association ouvrière des compagnons du devoir et du tour de France (AOCDTF), la Fédération compagnonnique des métiers du bâtiment (FCMB) et l’Union compagnonnique des devoirs unis (UCDDU). Cordonniers, selliers, fondeurs, ébénistes, pâtissiers… tous les métiers où le savoir-faire est de précision ont leurs compagnons. Et toutes les associations développent un système de formation basé sur l’apprentissage, les voyages pour aller à la rencontre de nouveaux « savoir-faire », l’acquisition de compétences, d’un métier. Mais la singularité de la pédagogie tient surtout à l’obligation qu’a chaque membre de rendre ce qu’il a appris sans attendre : la transmission est au cœur du compagnonnage.
Publicație : Le Monde
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