Paper short abstract:

Drawing from a five-year experience of teaching and communicating anthropology to future elementary schools’ teachers in Mayotte island, this paper seeks to explore the dynamics and challenges of teaching anthropology to non-anthropologists in the context of elementary schools’ teachers training.

Paper long abstract:

Mayotte: French at Any Price (Blanchy, 2002) is a European outermost territory situated in the Indian ocean in the channel between Mozambique and Madagascar. It represents the last French Department and faces enormous challenges: great part of the population live under the poverty line, witnesses a great immigration pressure from the neighboring islands and half of the population is less than 17 years old (INSEE 2019). By focusing on the importance given at the local level to the educational system and the urgent need of training the future elementary schools’ teachers, we will discuss in this paper the importance of teaching anthropology to non-anthropologists by using two different points of view: one of an anthropologist and the other one of a researcher in educational sciences. In the context of accelerated changes of Mayotte island, the authors will show here how it's difficult to get the “institution” to accept Master thesis dissertations focusing on anthropology research topics (i.e. children and/or students' living conditions outside school ; school and immigration issues; the student/child experiences in and outside the school etc.) that are supposed to aid the future teachers better understand their students in order to help them learn better. We will try to answer here the following questions: In which way the anthropological thinking can be of service to elementary school teachers in order to change their way of teaching and interacting with their students? How the teaching institutions and academia can be more sensible to anthropological issues?