Conditions fostering productive disciplinary engagement during a regular physics lesson in a depressed area school

Patrice Venturini (1) , Chantal Amade-Escot (1)

1 CREFI-T-DiDiST - Centre de Recherches en Education Formation et Insertion de Toulouse

Abstract This paper concerns conditions for fostering productive disciplinary engagement. They have been established during a regular physics lesson with a half class group in a secondary school (grade 7), located in a Priority education zone in a sensitive urban area. This case study has been realized using the video of the lesson and teacher and student interviews. The theory of didactic action (Sensevy and al., 2005) has been used to analyze the development of the lesson. We have examined the actors' participation in the progress of knowledge in the class and the building of the “didactic milieu” in which it takes place (like Brousseau, 1997, we consider that the milieu is “all that the students relate to at the learning moment”). This part of the investigation has been carried out using interviews. The disciplinary engagement has been evaluated using the criteria proposed by Engle and Conant (2002) (e.g. number of students in the group making significant contributions to the topic under discussion, nature of contributions - collaborative or independent - , number of students involved in “off-task” activities, relations between student's discourse and what is usually scholarly discussed in physics, progress of the students' knowledge, emergence of new questions). We observed in this lesson that productive disciplinary engagement was favored by a significant problematization of subject matter, combined with a particular management of the didactic interactions: the teacher chose a maieutical process (related to the Socratic method of eliciting knowledge by a series of questions and answers) based on collective exchanges, she prioritized dialogical communication, she facilitated the students' reasoning, clearly identifying the knowledge at stake in each step, delimitating the elements submitted to discussion, highlighting the relevant features of the studied situations, frequently institutionalizing knowledge as it progressed, and concluding exchanges herself when they became fruitless and demotivating. Under these conditions, the students collaborated in the teacher's action, allowing the progress of knowledge in the class thanks to their joint action, and at the same time, the disappearance of the discipline problems often linked to these kinds of schools.

Mots clés: PDE; JATD; engagement; deprived aera; productive disciplinary engagement _ jont actin theory in didactics

Mots clés: TACD; théorie action conjointe; ZEP; engagement disciplinaire productif; théorie de l'action conjointe en didactique

Domaines: Education

Patrice Venturini, Chantal Amade-Escot. Conditions fostering productive disciplinary engagement during a regular physics lesson in a depressed area school. 13th biennal conference EARLI 2009, Aug 2010, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp.on line. ⟨halshs-00567841⟩