Dossier documentaire : périodisation et participation citoyenne
A Brevet history-geography teacher is validating a document-based exercise on Lebanese emigration. The dossier contains a table (emigrants estimated at 1.4 million in 2019; roughly 300 000 people leaving between 2019 and 2022; remittances at about 6.4 billion USD in 2021), an extract from a municipal council decision authorising the conversion of the town's only public garden into a parking lot «to attract investors back to the town», and a petition signed by 340 residents opposing it. Question 1 (4 marks): «Identify two causes of emigration after 2019 and justify from the documents.» Question 2 (3 marks): «Does the municipal decision respect the rules of civic participation? Justify.» Three copies are on the desk. Copy A answers Question 1 with «the 1975 war and the Israeli occupation». Copy B writes «the banking crisis and the loss of savings, then the port explosion». Copy C answers Question 2 with «yes, because the council voted».
1. Score Question 1 for copies A and B, and explain the principle behind the scoring.
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Copy A: 0/4. The two causes named are historically real but lie outside the period fixed by the question (after 2019) and outside the documents. The table's outflow figure covers 2019–2022; the war of 1975 belongs to another causal regime, and the dossier gives no document supporting it. Giving a mark «for knowing a cause of emigration» would reward an answer to a question that was not asked. The written remark should name the error precisely - périodisation - not simply «hors sujet», and should show the pupil where the table dates the phenomenon.
Copy B: 4/4, provided the mechanism is stated. The banking crisis and the loss of savings give a mechanism (deposits frozen, savings destroyed, incomes lost) that pushes people out within the stated period; the port explosion destroyed housing and businesses in a single day and accelerated departures. Both are datable (2019; 4 August 2020) and both are consistent with the 2019–2022 outflow. If copy B names the causes but cites no document and no mechanism, cap at 3/4.
Principle: the mark rewards a cause situated in the period and argued through a mechanism, not a name recognised from a list. Copy A fails on the period; copy B succeeds on it.
2. Score Question 2 for copy C («yes, because the council voted») and outline the full expected answer.
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Copy C: 1/3. One point for the element that is correct: the municipal council is the elected, competent body, and a decision of this kind is taken by deliberation of the council. Zero for the rest, because the answer never reaches the actual question - civic participation - and cites no document. It is a one-line syllogism: the council voted, therefore the decision is democratic.
The full answer: the deliberation satisfies the formal competence of the council, but participation is not exhausted by a vote inside the council chamber. The dossier shows 340 residents who signed a petition and were not answered; the garden is a public space used collectively, and reallocating it to parking changes its use for all residents. A civic reading would add that residents can attend the council session, ask for the deliberation to be published, contest the decision before the administrative judge if the procedure was irregular, and above all use the next municipal election. The decision may be legal in form and still contested in substance - that distinction is exactly what the item is testing.
Feedback should ask copy C to use the petition: an answer that ignores a document placed in the dossier has not done document work.
3. A colleague wants Question 1's key to be a fixed list: «crise bancaire, explosion du port, chômage». How should the key be built instead?
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Use a criteria grid, not a list. A fixed list penalises a pupil whose vocabulary differs from the corrector's and rewards a pupil who copies a word without a mechanism.
Grid: for each of the two required causes -
- (a) the cause is situated within 2019–2022;
- (b) a mechanism is stated (what changed for households, work, housing, savings);
- (c) the answer is tied to at least one document in the dossier.
Under that grid these all pass: collapse of the lira and loss of savings; unemployment and falling income; the Beirut port explosion; disruption of schooling. «The war» fails (a). «Things are bad here» fails (b). «The table shows 300 000 left» states a consequence, not a cause, and fails both (b) and (c).
The corrector should write the grid at the top of the pile and mark against it, not against examples. That also protects the marking if a pupil brings a cause the teacher had not anticipated: the grid decides, not memory. The same logic applies to Question 2, where the three points should be allotted to competence of the council, use of the petition, and a conclusion linking the two.