Teaching without prescribed curricula and without textbooks: a way of expressing pedagogical expertise?

Media and information education (abbreviated as EMI in France) is a cross-disciplinary component of the French education system. One of its goals is to help students develop digital citizenship through critical thinking skills. EMI is not linked to any specific school subject and is integrated into all of them. While the French ministry of education calls for collective coherence without providing the usual tools (curricula, textbooks, programmes), EMI is unevenly approached by teachers through a heterogeneity of practices. Based on ongoing research into the motivations of some lower and upper secondary school teachers involved in EMI, the aim of this study is to determine what types of resources are mobilised, in a pedagogical environment that is built around an active approach. Results show that practice of EMI remains mostly implicit: teachers prefer to use the autonomy allowed by the weak institutional framework to create their own resources rather than relying on institutional resources, thus reinforcing their professional singularity and practising their pedagogical expertise.