User:Timeousbeastie/Laurence De Cock

Laurence De Cock, born in 1972, is a French essayist and historian.

She has been involved in public debates on the media and political uses of history since the mid-2000s, and since the early 2010s she has been developing research on the teaching of history (and in particular the colonial past) in France since the 19th century.

Biography
In 1996, she was admitted to the CAPES in history-geography and, six years later, to the internal agrégation in history/geography. She has been an associate professor of history and geography in a high school in Paris since 2015. She is also a lecturer at the University Paris-Diderot.

From the middle of the 2000s, she has been involved in debates concerning the teaching of history in secondary schools and from 2010 to 2011 she chaired the Comité de vigilance face aux usages publics de l'histoire (CVUH), founded by Gérard Noiriel and Nicolas Offenstadt, then became one of its two vice-presidents in 2011.

In 2011, she co-founded the website "Aggiornamento Histoire-géo", with Emmanuelle Picard, Patricia Legris and Suzanne Citron, dedicated to "reflections and proposals for a renewal of the teaching of history and geography from primary school to university".

From the beginning of the 2010s, she has regularly published articles on history teaching in France while preparing a doctoral thesis in education sciences, entitled "Le fait colonial à l'école: genèse et scolarisation d'un objet de débat public, scientifique et mémoriel (des années 1980 à 2015), essai de socio-histoire du curriculum" (The colonial fact in schools: genesis and schooling of an object of public, scientific and memorial debate (from the 1980s to 2015), an essay on the socio-history of the curriculum), which she defended in 2016 at the Université Lumière-Lyon-II under the supervision of Françoise Lantheaume. Her research focuses on the teaching of history and the articulation between republican universalism and cultural diversity.

At the same time, she participated in the writing of several textbooks for the publisher Nathan and books for high school students, and a lecturer in history didactics and pedagogy at the University of Paris-Diderot since 2005.

She participated in a column with the historian Mathilde Larrère on Mediapart, entitled "Les détricoteuses", about attempts to instrumentalise history.

In June 2020, she coordinated the adaptation of the magazine L'Histoire into a format aimed at secondary school students called L'Histoire Juniors.

Position statements
Laurence De Cock declares herself "committed to the left" and "close to Ensemble!" In May 2022, she joined the parliament of the Nupes, a left-wing union formed for the legislative elections.

A critique of the political use of history
In 2008, she co-edited a book denouncing the Sarkozian vision of history, and at the end of 2016 she received media attention for a Storify featuring Mathilde Larrère refuting the former French president's comments on the Gallic origins of France.

On 23 March 2017, she was invited by France 2's L'Émission politique to debate French history with François Fillon, the Republican presidential candidate. Although he recalled that she had been close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Front de Gauche before the start of her speech, some details of her past involvement were not made explicit, which caused a stir on Twitter.

School curricula
Laurence De Cock regularly takes part in debates concerning the development of history programmes. Her interventions are based on the idea that « l'histoire scolaire est incontestablement, dans son acte de fondation, un lieu d'usage public de l'histoire, car l'enseignement de l'histoire a d'emblée été chargé d'une finalité civique. En tant que tel, un programme peut donc se lire comme un projet mémoriel. » ("school history is unquestionably, in its founding act, a place of public use of history, because the teaching of history has from the outset been charged with a civic purpose. As such, a programme can therefore be read as a memorial project.)

In this perspective, the teaching of history, according to her, must first and foremost accompany the learning of a critical mind rather than only serve to forge a sense of national belonging.

In 2015, she took part in the critical movement launched by Benjamin Stora following the publication of the new history programmes. Stora, then president of the Orientation Council of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration, denounced "the weak place of immigration in the new programmes". Via the Aggiornamento collective, in an interview with Le Monde, she judged that there was a risk of 'muffling recent immigration'. However, she believes that the introduction of the theme of the long history of humanity and migration is an "interesting novelty".

Criticism
Zaka Toto, founder of the Caribbean magazine Zist, accuses Laurence De Cock of plagiarising him.

Collected works

 * Mémoires et histoire à l'école de la République : quels enjeux ? (avec Corinne Bonafoux et Benoît Falaize), Paris, Armand Colin, 2007 ISBN 9782200346355

Director or co-director of publication

 * Comment Nicolas Sarkozy écrit l’histoire de France (co-direction), Marseille, Agone, 2008 ISBN 9782748900934
 * Paniques identitaires (co-direction avec Régis Meyran), Le Croquant, 2017
 * La Fabrique scolaire de l’histoire (co-direction avec Emmanuelle Picard), Marseille, Agone, 2009 ISBN 9782748901061, 2e édition (direction), Marseille, Agone, 2017 ISBN 9782748903355.