Legitimizing conceptual and didactic tools through a Collaborative Didactic Engineering Research interconnecting teaching practices and research: a means of sustaining teachers' and researchers’ 'joy, passion and enthusiasm'?
Submitted by:
Glais Sales Cordeiro
Abstract:
Starting from issues regarding reading comprehension (L1) teaching and learning with storybooks in early primary school (students aged 4-8), we present in this paper presentation the conditions of emergence and construction of notional and didactic objects in a Collaborative Didactic Engineering Research (CDER) associating researchers and teachers (Cordeiro & Aeby Daghé, 2021) carried out in Geneva (French-speaking Switzerland). Following authors who point out the limits of 'theory-practice duality' (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Morales et al, 2017), our aim is to highlight the process of legitimization of a conceptual tool, the 'narrative-character system', and a didactic tool, the 'minimal activity circuit', by relating this process to the question of how to sustain teachers' 'joy, passion and enthusiasm', addressed in the introductory text of the Conference. The following research questions underlie our study: To what extent does the research design respond to teachers' interrogations and needs? Under what conditions does the research project engender the co-construction and legitimization of tools for both teachers and researchers on Didactics of French L1?
Our theoretical framework is based on the notion of 'didactic transposition' (Chevallard, 1985) and that of 'teaching object' as it is transposed for teaching and learning in the classroom (Schneuwly, 2009).
The research design is similar to that of a Design-Based Research. The design, implementation and readjustments of conceptual and didactic tools are continuous and involve a constant back-and-forth movement between research and practical claims. However, the latter may lead to fundamental transformations in the former as well. Data analysis is based on videos of activities carried out in 9 classrooms and audio recordings of 8 working sessions per year of 3 hours each over the four years of the project. Results show that legitimizing the tools developed throughout the project cannot be understood solely by a top-down transpositive process: the first half of the project is characterized by a cycle of successive co-constructions of both conceptual and didactic tools where the researchers’ contributions seem more significant; the second half, by the creation of a common space for design, discussion and analysis grounded as much in teacher practices as in research.