A transposition confined within its school framework?

For educationalists, the aim of school is to transmit knowledge that has absolute value and to create relevant didactic situations beyond differences in contexts, audiences, teachers, establishments, etc. ”  Educationists reason as if teaching were aimed at a generic, socially disembodied student  ,” some sociologists may suggest (Harlé, 2010a).

Conversely, by focusing too much on the social background of students, on the variations in content and teaching methods depending on social background, ”  we come to symbolically call into question not only the justification of the school institution, but even more so, its political function  ” warn educationalists (Develay, 2010).

Wary of the emphasis on skills, Crahay, for his part, favors a mission of the school as being that of the construction of knowledge (declarative knowledge), know-how (procedural knowledge) and living knowledge, leading ”  pupils and students to a critical relationship with knowledge  ” (Crahay, 2011). This presupposes a “cognitive montage”: construction of knowledge, coordination of knowledge, accessibility in working memory (Crahay, 2011).

The focus of didactics on the question of school knowledge and its teaching, that is to say, the transmission of a school culture, undoubtedly makes it legitimate when it comes to addressing the construction of teaching content. However, as Lahire underlines in his attempt to bring together didactics and sociology, didactics must not remain confined ”  within the narrow framework of the school institution  ” (2007).

An opening seems possible, judging by recent work in comparative didactics. Daunay proposes to take into account the diversity of content (knowledge, know-how, relationships, values, ways of acting, thinking, speaking, etc.), their articulation, and the relationship that each discipline establishes between these contents (between knowledge and values). Do these different teaching objects constitute a single discipline or several?

School culture vs. university culture?

For some, didactic transposition, which transposes scholarly knowledge into taught knowledge, can be satisfied with the image of a descending impregnation of university knowledge into school knowledge. For others, whether sociologists, educational psychologists or didacticians, cloning is not so simple, since the teaching objects do not mechanically correspond to an identified university discipline.

If the teaching of mathematics or biology can be satisfied with the appropriation of scientific knowledge by the school, the teaching of French calls upon both scholarly knowledge and expert knowledge (”  knowledge of those who know how to do things and know what they are doing  “, Schneuwly, 2008).

If proof of the ambiguous relationship between school and university disciplines were needed, it would be enough to note the treatment applied to the school discipline of history and geography: at least two clearly differentiated university disciplines correspond to one school discipline, two aggregations, a single CAPES and a single internal aggregation (Daunay, 2010).