The entire ACADIS group is committed to the INRP's 'Very Large Documentary Infrastructure' project at PRES Lyon, with the VISA project (to create a database for research into videos of learning situations, a national PPF involving the majority of French education science laboratories). More...

We are now able to draw upon the INRP's effective international department, as well as the European experience of Provence University's international department. This should lead us (in conjunction with the publication policy described above) to succeed in a greater number of European tender responses. This is a virtuous circle into which we need to enter. The explicit choice of certain international organisations should also assist us. To this end, we have a proactive participation policy (we are represented in the organising committees of major international conferences: CERME and PME for mathematics, ECER for comparative didactics, AFIRSE and AREF for education). More...

We produce a lot of information for dissemination, including documents designed for training and education protagonists. This goes well beyond our more traditional interventions in terms of face-to-face or remote training. Many of our research lecturers also produce work for publication (books on education, books for education, professional resources for teachers, editing of multimedia resources for educational protagonists, production of multimedia investigative techniques to be used in the classroom, etc.). 
This policy, which generally characterises the laboratory, corresponds to both the issues on which we are working and the explicit request of the INRP and its governing bodies. This makes us well placed in terms of our mixed tutelage, the INRP and Provence University, responsible for teacher training and, more broadly, the training of training professionals. More...

Specified subjects in relation to the four main themes will guide ACADIS' work throughout the next four years. We will have the possibility of forming several teams to focus on the subjects of a single theme. Around this, we will organise seminars open to all members of the group. The idea is to systematically conduct debates - we feel that the initial diversity of approaches demands this. These debates will involve shared reference subjects (at least in part). Team work will centre upon the observation of a particular scenario, or the monitoring of a phenomenon deriving from one of the theoretical approach the group is seeking to develop. The teams will thus bring their empirical work to the debate. Nevertheless, the research work, as well as collaborative action with individuals working on the ground, will also involve the construction of interpretations, which will be the result of joint work. We plan to organise three international conferences with the Association pour des Recherches Comparatives en Didactique (January 2013), on the ATD (November 2013) and, most probably, on Territorial Strategies related to schools or the teaching of French as a Foreign Language (dates not yet determined). This will enable us to tackle the issues raised with other teams from around the world. 
Finally, it should be noted that many members of ACADIS are involved in one of the multidisciplinary components of SFERE, the federal research organisation. This allegiance is shown in the list of the members of each team. This reflects our desire to open up educational issues to the sciences of society, such as cognitive science, since our focus lies precisely at the interface between these two recognised fields. More...

The ACADIS team examines the relationship between 'sociological' approaches and 'didactical' approaches in the context of institutions implementing their own educational projects, driven by society or any of its components in the direction of a social group within a particular local area, or society as a whole. The synergies expected from this group lie principally within this area. We focus on knowledge production in terms of processes for forming knowledge-related provisions, in terms of their personal, and also collective, dimensions: regionalities, for example. We also examine knowledge production in terms of the reverse movement. We define this as a process of didactical conversion of social subjugation, some dimensions of which are undoubtedly determined by regional strategies. More...

The initial purpose of didactics was to train teachers in an area little studied by the then dominant approaches on educational issues: philosophy (applied to education: general pedagogy), psychology (applied to education: scientific pedagogy) or sociology. The specific focus didactics placed on knowledge led us to observe the life of knowledge in the human group we call a class (anthropological theory of didactics), followed by the conditions of this life (its ecology) and the systems of constraints that determine its evolution. Is researching new solutions to teachers' issues now the main subject of disciplinary teaching approaches? The comparative position we have taken in the ACADIS group leads us, firstly, to also observe the pupils' involvement in the educational process (theory of joint action), to show how they are sometimes decisive protagonists in the teaching process for which the teacher has professional responsibility. Today, we are interested in the didactical issues raised in non-school conditions, where we observe the process of didactification, that is to say, the social predominance of school-type approaches as a universal response to social needs in terms of knowledge. More...

The teaching of school subjects was initially the main focus of educational questioning in a school environment, with observation of experienced practitioners. The learning process was the central subject of psychological questioning in laboratories, where we could observe the development of relationships to world objects. Today, however, the focus placed by educationalists on knowledge and the construction of knowledge organised in its natural educational environment no longer has the same meaning, since the techniques for accessing observations have changed. Thus, the weight of linguistic interactions between peers in the production of a collective thinking space is at the heart of educational work today. Monitoring the development of professionalism in the education professions is central to much of the work we carry out. This movement is the result of our 'field' work (i.e.: our work outside of the laboratory). It is thus situational, within the space of interaction between a teacher and their pupils with the aim of sharing knowledge. The issue here is the production of knowledge which is collectively built. The questions to which the actions of teachers and pupils provide answers no longer fall under a single discipline. They are related to a complex common activity, in a shared, so-called 'reference' environment. More...

The growing use of ICT, especially the Internet, is a social fact in the world of work and in the private sphere. The idea is to anticipate the problems these uses pose for educational institutions and to identify the potential of these technologies in education and training. In the current climate, digital campuses and IT environments for human learning fall within the range of teaching aids available to students in higher education. 
These devices generate new behaviours. The participation of Internet users in projects, whether spontaneous or directed, gives rise to particular groups or 'communities' bringing education and/or training projects to the fore. Through research, we should be able to analyse the impact of these social phenomena, their effectiveness and the resources on which they draw, at the same time questioning the ethics of the practices and knowledge produced and disseminated. More...

This research program is organised in three dimensions, corresponding to the major types of choices inherent in educational institutions: the choice of knowledge to be disseminated (praxeologies), the choice of teaching situations in which this dissemination should take place and the choice of training pathways. The 'praxeological choice' variable is combined with two other variables: the 'target group' variable (e.g. students in educational sciences) and the 'praxeological environment' variable (e.g. research and statistics methodology). Essentially, the target groups studied consist of: a) pupils in secondary education, b) students and researchers in educational sciences/didactics, c) mathematics teachers in secondary education, d) students in engineering schools. The praxeological environments are, essentially: 1) knowledge of mathematics, 2) knowledge of information retrieval on the Internet, 3) knowledge of sustainable development, 4) knowledge of research, including statistics and data analysis, 5) knowledge of the production and editing of texts, 6) didactic knowledge of study and teaching, both face to face and remotely. More...

The priority for this four-year period will be to bring together different approaches - mainly sociological, sociolinguistic, educational and regional - to socially controversial issues (teaching globalisation, education for sustainable development), for example in the context of the activity of observatories, and in partnership with other ADEF research teams, along with other regional, national, European and international teams. 
These original approaches - which have, in particular, enabled us to highlight the effects of regionality and regional specificities on education - have already been implemented on the ground, in a wide variety of contexts (rural schools, peri-urban areas). They have shown how parents and students develop personal strategies in relation to the school world to which they have access. The effects of these are collective. This should allow for a better understanding of the challenges of 'civic' education and the effects of the co-construction of knowledge, along with identities - social and subjective, epistemic and professional - in line with the development of the concept of 'territorial intelligence'. More...