Scientific themes

The title of the conference - Current developments of the relation to mathematics and other knowledges at school and in society - refers to the transformations that are currently influencing the educational landscape (e.g. school, university, professional, and other arenas) by changing the usual relation to knowledge and, accordingly, the relation to the taught knowledge. The new or renewed problems resulting from these transformations are a scientific challenge for the didactic science insofar as it must now be detached from the "classical" school organization (in a version once considered as "modern"). The detachment seems necessary to continue to fulfil its mission of theoretical clarification and to increase its capacity to advise and regulate in didactic organization matters.

        By analysing the conditions and constraints that govern the didactic and that exist in institutions located at different levels of society (discipline, pedagogy, school, society, etc.), ATD enables an initial, inclusive approach to didactic phenomena, whether they occur in the school context, educational environment, or teacher professional development, in cultural or leisure activities, or even in the social context of everyday life. The themes of this 4th conference are articulated according to four main axis we introduce hereafter.

Axis 1. Perspectives in ATD, relations to other approaches

This traditional axis aims at locating the contributions and current trends in ATD within the "continent of the didactic", both nationally and internationally. This axis calls for an open and dynamic assessment of recent results and research perspectives, in several disciplinary domains.

Axis 2. Praxeological analysis as a tool for didactic analysis and engineering

Axis 2 puts together questionings of a fundamental kind with questionings in relation to professional training (at an individual level as well as at the level of training and research teams) : given a knowledge and a didacticist studying the conditions and constraints of dissemination of this knowledge, what would be a praxeological model of reference (PMR) for the researcher? How to determine, build and use such PMR?

        In contrast with the simple pedagogical approach to knowledge dissemination at school, didactics has always been defined as giving a decisive importance (in didactic analysis as well as in didactic engineering) to conditions and constraints specifically related to the "didactic issue", that is to those conditions and constraints that are brought along with both the question under consideration and the works that instrument the study of this question. This axis stresses a double movement. The first aspect traditionally consists in relating the praxeological analysis (e.g. mathematical analysis) of the didactic issue to the didactic analysis or engineering in view. In this first movement, one tries to identify the structure and functioning of the work under study in order to find out which constraints it imposes and which conditions are left open and could be used. The second movement, one might say, is in the opposite direction : deepening the praxeological analysis of a work makes necessary the didactic analysis of its institutional genesis through the several didactic transpositions it has undergone : where does this work come from? why has it appeared? which transformations, reductions, additions, denaturations, regenerations did it suffer, why and how? The interest of these and other questions is revived, in particular since recent developments lead to try to adapt the common relation to knowledge and works to the requirements of practices that are strongly emerging in the frame of the paradigm of "questioning the world" (see Axis 3).

Axis 3. From visiting works to questioning the world

Axis 3 refers to the major process currently underway : the still poorly understood change that affects the school study paradigm. Therefore, this axis is connected to a field of research that has been intensively explored for several years: the study of the historical transition from the classical school study paradigm (in which new knowledges are studied one after the other, and often introduced without a genuine motive, so that an important part of didacticists' work up to now was to find out significant questions the study of which would transform such knowledges into tools, necessary to elaborate an answer to these questions) to an emerging didactic paradigm in which the ideal type situation is to start from a question and aim at building an answer to this question. In this paradigm, no limitation whatever is imposed a priori as regards the manifold tools that might be met, studied, used in order to elaborate an answer. The old and still "official" paradigm is based on the formal study of the knowledge taught as consisting of works (mathematical, literary, grammatical works, etc.) that are visited in turn, in a way that is generally unmotivated at the praxeological level. The current exhaustion of the paradigm of visiting works, whose functioning requires a rarefying docile student, led for decades to the erratic emergence of new school forms where the questions that are to be studied replace the works that are to be visited. In this paradigm of questioning the world, highlighted by the notions of inquiry (of a given question) and study and research courses (SRC) determined by a concrete investigation that it determines in turn, the works of culture do not disappear: they are assigned a more authentic functional role from a praxeological point of view, which requires studying a given work in synergy with other works, with the aim of providing an appropriate answer, even partial, to a question or set of questions (which then constitute a fragment of the "program" of the study). This profound historical development, which raises many questions, is at the center of much current research within ATD. This axis particularly welcomes presentations of works involved in the critical study of the notion of inquiry-based teaching and of similar notions to be found in several countries (such as the "official" notion of démarche d'investigation scientifique in France).

Axis 4. Contributions of ATD to teaching and knowledge dissemination

Axis 4 promotes a set of problems that are considered of paramount importance in ATD, both for societies and didactic researchers : the problems a society is faced to in the course of conceiving and achieving projects of knowledge dissemination. This research program basically deals with all sorts of institutions and agents of any level, amateur or professional, who mean to contribute to the dissemination of praxeological systems of all kind.

       Today, the core of such a program is the study of teachers professionalities, at school, at university or in companies. This study is based on two main concepts. The first key notion is that of a profession, providing one subsumes under this notion the whole set of agents that are involved in the teaching of such and such subject. For instance, in the case of school teaching, the profession is not only made of teachers, which nevertheless constitute the major part of the profession, but also of associative or union activists who have to deal whith this teaching, and also teachers trainers, school inspectors, ministerial staffs responsible for this teaching, to which must be added researchers who study the problem of teaching the subject under consideration. The second key notion is that of a problem of the profession, which refers to the various difficulties one has to deal with in the practical work of teaching. These difficulties can be first felt as subjective, but they must be elaborated into objective difficulties when at least part of the profession has to face them. Then, observation and analysis of conditions and constraints of the profession should allow to identify these difficulties : only at this cost can they be perceived as worthy of a collective mobilization of professional ressources.

       The current development of the school study paradigm, which is at the core of above mentioned axis 3, as well as the sometimes brutal variations in societies' involvement in the organized dissemination of knowledge, bring to today's research hard and often new problems.

 
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