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Fabien Truong is asked about pedagogical practices, starting with the relationship between his experiences of traveling abroad with students and colleagues and his longitudinal sociological investigations into the backgrounds of students in Seine-Saint-Denis. Do intense but brief experiences change the findings of pertinent surveys over time? The laboratory dimension of the journey exacerbates issues of identity and identification and shows the students’ constrained relationship with landscape, plants and physical displacement. It shifts the pedagogical relationship through shared promiscuity and adventure, but the seam (Netter 2019) between what happens in and out of the classroom is essential and it is up to teachers to support it in accordance with their professional positions, their knowledge, their ability to communicate with students, and their ongoing tinkering of their own social depth.More broadly, the interview underscores the need for detailed knowledge of student populations, extremely useful for teachers, often a neo-titular in the banlieues, who address social beings in a variety of social configurations. This knowledge is built up through training, the contribution of social sciences, a reflective relation to their careers and, above all, over time, because experience is irreplaceable when faced with a diversity of problems: dropping out of school, delinquency, religion, masculinity and gender differences, violence, but also over-investment in schools, feelings of illegitimacy… It seems that, in the short term, schools see the classroom in terms of trajectories (and not the other way around) and focus on managing conflicts. In the long term, however, the role of the public authorities, the State and schools produces valve effects and social mobility, however small and, to some extent, residual.