Such a system has been in place since 2000 at Cefedem Rhône-Alpes, now Cefedem Auvergne Rhône-Alpes. This center is based in Lyon, France, under the authority of the Ministry of Culture, and offers two-year programs leading to the Music Teacher State Diploma, geared towards the teaching of music in conservatories and all music schools established throughout the country. In 2003, France had “more than 3,300 public schools (run by public authorities or by associations subsidised by these authorities)” (Ministère de la culture et de la communication 2004, 5).
This “resource hour” system was one of the elements that made it possible to welcome all the students, whatever their practices. From the beginning, the center has chosen to have a permanent team, therefore necessarily reduced but allowing a collective follow-up of the students. So, all the knowledge and competences cannot be present within the structure, while this team wish to accompany all the practices of the students. They have several long devices to carry out, each one with a specification: for example, those of performance projects (Charles, Scheppens, Hahn, and Clément 2006), or research-action (Chagnard, Haranger-Segui, and Sidoroff 2017) or practice-inquiry (Desmurs, and Sidoroff 2018). Each time, such a project is negotiated between the student and the referent-teacher. The latter ensures that the project remains within the framework set by the institution, i.e. that the student can go through the essential issues associated to each device. In defining what the student wishes to do, he or she must identify the resources to be mobilised, both material (books, articles, videos or anything else, but also including the necessary equipment) and human (“people who have skills and knowledge relevant to” the student’s topic, University of Maryland 2020). The latter bring together all the specialists in the different aspects of the question worked on by the student, allowing her or him to bring them together and immerse them in their contexts and ways of doing things. The Cefedem team also feeds this list of people. Very often, it is necessary to “invent” such people by making their typical profile. With the networks of the student, her or his colleagues and those of the Center, augmented by some internet research, one can regularly find almost this profile, or two persons responding to the very most of the expectations. The definition of the project resources is not just a list, but for each one, the student has to specify what he or she wants and plans to find in/with it. For many of the people listed, an interview or a discussion in connection with an observation in a professional context (where the resource person is already paid) is sufficient. But, with some others, it may be interesting to plan a specific job, requiring remuneration and an employment contract as a trainer for the student. This is where the “resource hours” budget comes in.
The specifications of the action-research program describe it as follows:
The Cefedem chooses not to make employment contracts of less than 3 hours, to guarantee that there’ll be enough time for the student to have a minimal professional exchange (and to limit the number of contracts to establish).
It is not easy for students to understand how it works, nor for the resource persons solicited. Several editions of the document « Les personnes ressources, comment ça marche ? » (“The resource persons and resource hours, how does it work?”) were necessary. This document details the conditions and rate, so that the student can contact the resource person(s) and explain how it works. This document specifies also that these contracts can be of different types according to the status of the person to be paid, and that this budget of hours can also be used to pay or participate in the pedagogical costs of an enrolment for a training course, a teaching, a seminar, etc. The teacher also specify that “it is possible—and even advisable—to pool resources between several students with similar projects and needs” (FIN 2020, 4), so that the students exchange among themselves on their project and research to see if it could be interesting to meet and work together with the same person, not necessarily for the whole time. For example, two students wishing to discover jazz could share a time on cultural inputs and resources, and each one also takes a more personal time on the specific jazz practice she or he wishes to work on. After agreement with the referent-teacher, the students fill in a form so that the administrative team of Cefedem can contact the designated persons and establish employment contracts. Then, the student is responsible for the return of the attendance sheet signed by the persons in question.
On the students' side: on the one hand, the work on the notion of resources through the contract requires them to explain the resources they already have, those they know are available, those that are possible, those that can be envisaged and those to be found. This set of resources is often far too large for the time available in the training! That is to say that they have to choose with the referent-teacher the ones they prefer. This is one of the ways to specify and refine the project. And after, they can, outside the institution, continue their research, having already some trails (this is also one of the questions in the assessment interviews when the device is done). On the other hand, they are in a position of responsibility towards the people they are asked to work with and towards Cefedem. The time allotted is not very long: it is not a question of taking a weekly course over the two years, but of choosing to work on this and not that, thus putting oneself in the position of an active learner on this learning, and still refining one's project. The fact that there is an employment contract helps to position oneself in this way. The fact that there is a remuneration allows some students to contact and work with people they would never have imagined or dared to ask.
On the teacher's side, finding oneself accompanying a project on a musical practice that one does not master is very rich in learning. (I’m a specialist of the techno-electro musical underground practices, and you want to work on the influence between Mozart and Haydn on their String Quartets?) The referent-teacher is then a specialist in learning, especially in this learning device and in its training issues. He or she is not a specialist in the content, others can take charge of that if necessary. And this position of "Ignorant Schoolmaster" as developed by Jacques Rancière (based on the experiences and writings of Joseph Jacotot), is very formative, and transferable with contents in which the teacher is a specialist. To allow the students' intelligence to function with others, without explaining: to emancipate.
On the administrative side, each year, 90 students work with about 200 different resource persons paid with this system, from 3h to 14h. The follow-up is a large time job, because of the number of both the students, all autonomous, and the resource persons with very different status depending on their situation at the time. This follow-up begins with having in time the right informations needed to make the employment contract, ends with making the paiement, and in the middle, all little but numerous negociations with students, trainers and resource persons. This system needs the people in the institution to cooperate with each other: the students, the teachers and the administrative staff have to work together to make it work.