Recherche

Research Group on Comparative Didactics (GREDIC)

The Research Group on Comparative Didactics (GREDIC) is led by Prof. Francia Leutenegger.

Research Fields

The research program of the Research Group on Comparative Didactics (GREDIC) at the University of Geneva is rooted is the questions and debates attended by the Association for Comparative Researches in Didactics (ARCD). With a broad anthropological view, we ambition the study of how human beings become acquainted to certain knowledge practices through a socialisation process.

  1. As a research field grounded in Educational Sciences and more broadly in Human and Social Sciences, Comparative Didactics examines theories and concepts that are borrowed from other fields (such as psychology, sociology, linguistics and communicationnal sciences, history, epistemology, anthropology...etc) for carrying out its purposes. It also consider the relationships between the knowledge being taught and the expert / academic field where this knowledge is derived from.
  2. Drawing on a socio-interactionist epistemology, Comparative Didactics incorporates the historical and cultural components of social practices. This involves the articulation of differents scales of analyses according to a clinical and experimental approach, as a methodology. Typically, our analyses of teaching and learning pratices range from macro-scale (up to several months), meso scale (one /few working session or lessons) and micro-scale (actions over few minutes or few seconds) mapping of events in order to built a significant system that accounts for a didactical phenomenon.

This comparative perspective, contrasting knowledge stakes and social organisations, aims at contributing to a the debate on the role of knowledge in societies and to the development of new knowledge about subjects (those who learn, those who teach) and institutions. To achieve this, we acknowledge the need for a descriptive model of teaching and learning practices and we contribute to the growth of a Joint Action Theory in Didactics, in collaboration with some other research teams