Societal links

Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, in partnership with the Dévelop'Ponts student association, initiated a tutorship program called “Expérience Ouverture”. The nature of this partnership has been established since January 2012 through an agreement between the School and the association.

Description

The program include 2 types of action

• Tutorship takes place in groups managed by student volunteers from the School. The program includes: various trips and fun workshops mainly in the Paris region, on 10 Wednesdays in the school year, from 3:15 pm to 6:30-7 pm Every year, almost 60 high school students from Champs-sur-Marne and Noisiel take part.
• Academic support classes and orientation sessions are given by volunteer first-year student engineers from the School, to more than 80 high school students from Champs-sur-Marne, Noisiel and Noisy-le-Grand every Thursday evening from 6 pm to 8 pm on our premises, between October and end of May.

Project objectives and procedures

“Expérience Ouverture” is aimed at high-school (collège and lycée) students from disadvantaged backgrounds, to encourage them to develop their curiosity and awareness of science and technology.

The idea is to overcome cultural and psychological barriers to higher education. They are selected on 3 specific criteria: motivation, social background, gender mix.  

Since 2008, Cordée Gerschwin has continued to grow.

It began with 16 high school students from 2 schools in Val Maubuée (Luzard College in Noisiel and Armand Lanoux in Champs-sur-Marne) and 8 student engineers.
Today, Cordée Gershwin concerns 8 high schools, supporting 200 high school pupils from 8 schools in the area.

• 5 “collèges”: Armand-Lanoux in Champs-sur-Marne, Victor Hugo in Noisy-le-Grand, Jean Campin in La Ferté-Gaucher, Beaumarchais in Meaux and Camille Saint-Saens in Lizy-sur-Ourq.
• 3 “lycées”: Descartes in Champs-sur-Marne, Simone Veil in Noisiel and Evariste Galois in Noisy-le-Grand.

Educational content and topics

Every year, one topic is chosen as a framework for activities activities:

• "Science... or magic?" in 2022-2023,
• The protection of the environment in 2020-2021,
• Curiosity and discovery in 2019-2020,
• Observe and create in 2018-2019
• The engineer in the heart of nature in 2017-2018
• Between engineering and utopia in 2016-2017.

The different educational activities, a combination of visits, practical experiments, theoretical explanations, feedback sessions, are run by the tutors with the help of the referring teachers from the partner schools. At the end of the year, a feedback session on School premises brings together high-school and lycée students, school directors, involved teachers, parents, and figures from the academic and political worlds. At these events, it is the school and lycée pupils themselves who present the experiments and visits and describe their experience.

Every year, Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, withe the association Dévelop'Ponts, runs an open information day for high-school students. The Cordées de la réussite aim to promote access to higher education for young people from all socio-cultural backgrounds, by giving them the keys to successfully commit to courses of excellence.

Objectives

• to provide high school students with information on all the strands of higher education
• to motivate them to consider future careers with potential
• to demystify high-quality education and combat self-censorship

Target population

• young people from lycées located in problem areas and small towns, which do not offer preparatory classes for France’s grandes écoles,
• high-school students socially unexposed to the existence of higher education opportunities and how to access them.