Abstract

The French alternative schools belonging to FÉSPI promote and provide alternative educational practices for their students—whether assigned, seeking an alternative to mainstream schooling, or young people who have dropped out. These schools demand a different set of professional skills from teachers, who also claim a distinctive approach to teamwork. This article examines the functioning and dynamics of these teams using a clinical approach informed by psychoanalytic theory. Building on research into group dynamics, which conceptualizes these teams as “restricted groups” in which defenses and resistances circulate, this approach seeks to capture the intersubjective and group-level processes that may hinder teamwork or even compromise the achievement of its primary tasks. These analyses lead us to propose a definition of “teamwork” that, while grounded in these sociological analyses, also incorporates consideration of these group-level processes.