Abstract
This chapter aims at clarifying the purposes of the development of Comparative didactics in the French-speaking educational research, and the potential of this research field for addressing curriculum issues from a bottom-up perspective i.e., from classroom studies. First, certain salient characteristics of the development of subject didactics in French-speaking research are reminded to explain the conditions of the emergence of comparative didactics as a comprehensive science of knowledge transmission in teaching and learning practices. The notion of “didactic system” and “didactic transposition” are central to the conceptualization of the generic features of teaching and learning. Epistemological and methodological issues inherent to the analysis of dynamic systems are examined to highlight the necessity of defining a “tertium comparationis” for comparing (or relating) teaching and learning practices about different knowledge contents, in different cultural contexts, and at different time scales. The Joint action framework in didactics (JAD) is presented as a response to this need, functioning as a generic framework anchored in the analysis of the content specificity of teaching and learning practices. This theoretical development allows didactic research to shift from the subject structure of knowledge contents to the contents built in classroom transactions as the departure point of the analysis. This shift opens new perspectives for understanding the consequence of curriculum reforms from the perspective of the teachers and the students.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper, and in the Francophone context more generally, the use of the term “transmission” qualifies ways of doing, saying, and thinking that are learned (or re-constructed) from those who already master these ways of doing, saying or thinking. The use of the term “transmission” stresses the need to consider teaching-learning practices as socio-historical processes marked by the continuity of some cultural traditions (school disciplines or other normative forms of activity) in which knowledge takes shape. Hence, “transmission” here does not presuppose a specific conceptualization of teaching and learning as “transmissive” or “constructivist” in the French-speaking educational discourse.
- 2.
The triangle linking the teacher, the students and the knowledge content is also emblematic of the European traditions of research in Didactics, but its meaning differs according to the conceptual background of these traditions.
- 3.
The word “paradigm” is used in a general sense without keeping the Kuhnian principle of incommensurability. Didactic research may rather be regarded as a research program in Imre Lakatos’s sense.
- 4.
Programming over time, collective management of activities, and the assessment of the learning outcomes. The notion of didactic transposition shares some similarities with Basil Berstein’s notion of “recontextualization” in pedagogic discourses (Bernstein 1990/2003).
- 5.
The emergence of comparative didactics in the early 2000s, which proposed the Joint action framework in Didactics as a generic set of analytical categories for the study of ordinary didactic practices, may have reinforced the influence of the Didactics of Mathematics on other fields. This aspect will be developed in the third section of this chapter.
- 6.
- 7.
The analogy with medical clinical practice supports the idea that the interpretation of classroom events relies upon multiple series of signs found by the observer and, hence, that the methods for investigating classroom events should favor the collection of signs through different perspectives (at least that of the three poles of the didactic system) to compare multiple series. This analogy is epistemological, not methodological.
- 8.
In the preface of “Occhiaci di legno” (“A distance” in French), the Historian Carlo Ginzburg explains: “I have been teaching since 1988 in Los Angeles. Addressing a student audience at the University of California, whose background is far removed from my own, and which is itself made up of ethnically and culturally diverse individuals, has forced me to consider my long-familiar research themes in a different way” (2001, p.11; my translation).
- 9.
In experimental methods, direct comparison is possible through the relation between a test group and a control group, in which all variables but one are the same.
- 10.
The notion of « milieu » was first conceptualized by Brousseau (1997) within the Theory of Didactic Situation in Mathematics, as anything upon which the students act with and upon, and from which they may get feedback about their action. In the JAD framework, the milieu is rather seen as the context in which the teacher and the students’ action develop, featuring both the resources and the problems to address in performing a task (see Sensevy, 2011).
- 11.
Brousseau (1997) termed this search for an agreement a “didactic contract” at play between the teacher and the students. It is not a firmly established contract because its stakes – from the participants’ standpoints – are always renewed as teaching progresses.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Chantal Amade-Escot, Georg Breidenstein, Yoann Buyck and Marie Sudriès, who made some very constructive comments during the preparation of this paper.
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Ligozat, F. (2023). Comparative Didactics. A Reconstructive Move from Subject Didactics in French-Speaking Educational Research. In: Ligozat, F., Klette, K., Almqvist, J. (eds) Didactics in a Changing World. Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Educational Research, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20810-2_3
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