Comparative Didactics Team (Archives anglaises, pas en ligne)
Since the 2000's, comparative researches in didactics are a renewed way of thinking about teaching and learning practices, growing up from subjects matter didactics, as they developped in the French speaking educational research community.
In this perspective, teaching and learning is envisioned across various educational settings, formal and/or informal, school and / or training institutions, and across the traditional frames of the human culture in subject matters and/or academic disciplines. The rationale is to develop a better understanding of knowledge diffusion and sharing in societies. A major concern is to characterize the components of the teaching and learning practices that are specifically related to knowledge organisations in socio-cultural settings.
The research program of the Comparative Didactics Team 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 domains (such as psychology, sociology, linguistics and communicational 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 (a series of lessons within a teaching unit) and micro-scale (actions across few minutes or few seconds) mapping of events in order to build a significant system that accounts for a didactical phenomenon.
This comparative perspective, contrasting knowledge stakes and social organisations, aims at contributing to the debate on the role of knowledge in societies and to the development of new knowledge aboutteachers, students 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.
In 2002, a special issue of the Revue Française de Pédagogie was devoted to Comparative Didactics as new research trend. More details may be found in :
- Mercier, Schubauer-Leoni & Sensevy (Eds) (2002). Vers une didactique comparée, Revue Française de Pédagogie, 141. Lyon : INRP.
- Caillot, M. (2007). The building of a new academic field : the case of the French Didactiques. European Educational Research Journal, 6 (2), 125-131
- Van Zanten, A. (Dir) (2008). Dictionnaire de l'Education. Paris : PUF