The Piagetian roots in Roger Lécuyer’s thinking

This article is a tribute that, by visiting Roger Lécuyer’s work, allows us to address some current problems of developmental psychology and its links with education. It is the same gesture of homage that allows us to reconsider transversal problems of 20th century psychology, as well as some of its more current versions. Indeed, paying tribute to an author should not simply consist in an uncritical celebration, but above all in recognising the relevance of his or her questions, his or her efforts to answer them and to identify the relationship of the proposed assumptions with the current disciplinary field.
Roger Lécuyer’s academic work has many edges (Schneider et al., 2024). But there is one that we would like to highlight: its connection with the Piagetian approach. Or at least, with a key part of the theoretical and metatheoretical core of the constructivist research program. Indeed, a significant proportion of Lécuyer’s work is concerned with the problem of transformational change and its explanation. For him, this problem cannot be regarded as one possible option among others, but as an unavoidable aspect of contemporary psychology: “The existence of developmental psychology should be self-evident, and this designation should be considered a pleonasm. Everything develops. However, in our conceptualization of the living, everything appears to occur as if we were compelled to view it as something fixed” (Lécuyer, 2020, p. 18, our translation). On several occasions, Lécuyer insisted on the fact that psychology is defined by the study of processes of change and that the psychological fact cannot be captured in the fiction of isolated or synchronic and modular competence, but in the continuity with its precursors and with the conditions of possibility…