La construcción conjunta de un observatorio y de un objeto teórico : el ejemplo del relato de experiencia y del espacio de acción

Abstract

The aim of this paper, based on a study conducted with a 26-student class engaged in an annual “Arctic Kayak” project, is twofold. The first challenge is to present the dynamics of joint construction, going back and forth between observation analysis and theoretical object. The second is to introduce two new concepts that might benefit the course-of-action research program. The first, “story of experience”, helps designing and conducting observation research to collect and analyze the experience of large groups of actors over a relatively long period of time. Such stories offer a condensed description of students’ individual experiences during the kayak classes, providing multiple angles of analysis. The second concept is “action field”, which is a subset of the “course-of-experience” theoretical object. For an actor and a given unit of time, this corresponds to all elements of its environment to which it attributes characteristics. Analysis of the students’ action fields allowed us to identify evolutions and transformations which are typical of the students’ perceptual judgments during classes. These results clarify the hypothesis of the three processes (in-situation, in-corporation, in-culturation) of appropriation proposed by Theureau.

Keywords

• course of action
• kayak
• story of experience
• field of actions
• appropriation