Loris Quêtu

Shaking up the school to reconcile knowledge and students

Graduated from Arizona State University and Paris-Saclay University, Loris Quêtu is a teacher and educational engineer specializing in the design of learning devices and the analysis of contemporary educational issues. Since 2023, he has been directing his career towards studying the mechanisms of adolescents' exposure to ideological content online, as well as the prevention issues related to the dynamics of radicalization in digital environments. As a young teacher in history-geography and HGGSP, he situates his practice within a structured reflection on the contemporary transformations of informational environments and their effects on the formation of students' political and social representations. His field experience leads him to observe an increasing exposure of school audiences to ideological content circulating mainly via social networks and digital platforms, fostering phenomena of polarization, simplification of reality, and, in some cases, dynamics of progressive radicalization of discourse. These developments are part of profound recompositions of the public space, marked by the fragmentation of information sources, the accelerated circulation of content, and the rise of algorithmic logics. In this environment, students are confronted with a diversity of discourses ranging from institutional media productions to alternative, conspiratorial, or ideologically oriented content. Among these phenomena, masculinist discourses constitute a particularly significant object, as they articulate representations of gender, power, and society within digital ecosystems structured by the logics of virality and informational insularity. In this context, his pedagogical approach aims to integrate these transformations at the heart of contemporary geopolitics education, understood not only as the study of power relations between states but also as the analysis of transnational circulations of ideas, strategies of influence, and recompositions of political imaginaries. This extension of the analytical field allows for the articulation of disciplinary content with the informational realities that students face daily. From a didactic perspective, he chooses to transform these objects into supports for critical learning, mobilizing approaches from social sciences and historical methods: analysis of documentary corpuses, confrontation of sources, study of discourse, contextualization of media productions, and putting observed phenomena into perspective. The goal is to develop in students rigorous information analysis skills, understanding of the mechanisms of discourse construction, and critical distancing from ideological content. This approach is also part of an educational prevention logic, understood not as a normative approach but as an intellectual training work aimed at equipping students against the risks of cognitive simplification, informational confinement, and discursive manipulation. The challenge is to enable them to understand the mechanisms of diffusion, structuring, and sometimes radicalization of ideas in the digital space. In this framework, the stakes for the National Education appear major: it is about strengthening the capacity of the school system to take into account these new forms of informational socialization, to systematically develop students' critical thinking, and to more structurally integrate education on media, information, and contemporary geopolitical issues into learning. This implies an evolution of pedagogical practices, a better consideration of students' digital uses, as well as a strengthening of critical analysis skills in the face of ideological content circulating outside the school space. From a pedagogical standpoint, this orientation relies on various devices: inquiry-based learning, work on digital and media documents, reasoned debates, production of content by students (analyses, podcasts, files), as well as the use of digital tools that promote research, verification, and contextualization of information. These modalities allow students to be placed in an active posture of knowledge construction.