ADEF - GESTEPRO Team - Team goals

The three research programmes currently underway are guiding the research of our team members. Much of this work is carried out in collaboration with teams external to the ADEF research group, in the context of cooperative projects on a national and international level.

•     Role of graphic intermediaries in structuring scientific and technological thinking through educational activities: building meanings based on academic tasks necessarily exceeds the implementation of (educational) techniques for completing the task. Structured symbolic languages (diagrams, drawings, plans, organigrams, flowcharts, etc.) can be used as aids for structuring activities, but their use in teaching may, under certain conditions, be identified as a barrier to learning. An artifact-based approach, with issues linked to instruments (with the corollaries instrumentation and instrumentalisation) provides the elements of a conceptual framework being built for these particular situations
•     The role of teaching tools (pedagogical materials, textbooks, maquettes, reduced models, computer simulations, etc.) in the teaching and learning process in science and technology education: scientific, technological and vocational teaching often draws upon teaching devices intended to represent an external reality in the classroom. The development of these devices is based on more or less explicit choices about the references used, the constraints selected and the knowledge brought to the fore. Analysing these choices allows us to put together observation grids for situations arising from the use of these tools in a classroom and approach the issue of performance, either from a descriptive and explanatory perspective or from a predictive and remedial perspective. In this sense, the idea is either to analyse the impact of existing tools, or to design new devices through a form of didactic engineering.
•     Development of knowledge for teaching based on social practices: the constant reference to practices in vocational education, as well as in some dimensions of technological and scientific education, is examined based on the description of these practices. The choices made in terms of the description methodologies, preferred organisations and descriptors employed have a direct impact on the implementation of these practices in textual form - the way they take shape in reference tools for teaching and, subsequently, in the process of developing tasks given to pupils. The researchers involved in this programme propose an analysis of the process of didactic transposition at work, particularly through epistemological delimitations and didactic organisations established in the knowledge transmission and appropriation process. More...