Perceptions and Analysis of Digital Risks

3“A Big Nebula that is a Bit Scary” (Louise, Trainee Schoolteacher): Training through/in Digital Technology, in School and in Professional Training

In 1986, Ulrich Beck crowned the advent of a so-called “risk society”, which is no longer solely concerned with the endangerment of individuals by forces of nature, but sees technological development as a source of deep insecurity for individuals and the collective in general (Beck 2001). Today, many digital risks have been identified, covering fields as varied as computer science, law, cognition and information. The media panics linked to these digital risks are knocking on the doors of schools¹, which are being called upon to adapt to the digital world. This in turn calls into question the teachers, who are themselves social actors “caught”, in the Sartrean sense of the term, in the demands, fears and hopes stirred up by society (Sartre 1985), as well as their institution of belonging (Cordier 2018), and the very exercise of a profession that consists of “acting in urgency (and) deciding in uncertainty” (Perrenoud 1999). The teaching profession is fundamentally a profession in which risk-taking reigns, with pedagogy calling for a consideration of both otherness and alteration, welcoming knowledge that is always in motion, made up of permanent re-configurations (Veyrié 2014). This risk-taking seems to be strongly accentuated when it comes to these actors taking on a mission that has now been fully devolved to them, namely education ...