ABSTRACT
Present-day educational policies convey the image of an active, engaged, and self-reflective individual who takes responsibility for learning into their own hands. The contributions in this book address how this figure of the autonomous learner shapes educational practices. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in classrooms in Switzerland, France, and Germany, they analyse the social organization of autonomy-oriented settings, teaching routines, and pupil learning, as well as practices of differentiation and subjectivation of pupils and teachers. The book brings into dialogue two neighbouring research traditions that analyse autonomous learning from a sociological perspective and which have largely ignored each other until now. The introduction contextualizes the figure of the autonomous learner by connecting it to the philosophical debate on the concept of autonomy and by situating it historically in different discourses and didactical approaches to autonomous learning.
