Endavant tà l’escola ! – Calandretas

Alain Benesty, with the help of the team from the Calandreta school of Lys, and in particular Myriam Monthelie, immerses us in the daily life of a bilingual immersive and cooperative Occitan school, through the lives of its practitioners—children and adults alike—but also everyone who gravitates around it: parents, fellow citizens, former students, local officials…It is also a film that offers a glimpse into the everyday reality of a kind of work that is at once free, collective, and intimate, through the pedagogical tools of immersive bilingualism and cooperative pedagogies (Freinet techniques, institutional pedagogy). It portrays an environment where pedagogical tools and frameworks make it possible to welcome the singularity of each individual, including—and above all—their family history, their culture, their language. These schools do not replicate in Occitan the “forced inclusion” that too often governs the French-speaking classes of the national education system: instead, Occitan becomes a language of welcome, a common language that opens the way to multilingualism and to free forms of belonging that turn our lives into transcultural, translinguistic journeys. But these are also schools where such singularities—welcomed, especially when children carry the weight of their migrations—nonetheless help to build a shared environment: an institutionalized space where power belongs to the group of people who live and work within it,where they shape it—both the political and intimate subjects of this living and creative space.