L’activité narrative dans ses dimensions multi instrumentée et créative en situation pédagogique

Abstract

Narrative activity is an activity to which insufficient attention has been paid in the literature so far - although in ergonomics, many studies are beginning to recognize its importance. Our study examines children’s narrative activity guided by adults in a pedagogical situation, mobilizing in a complementary manner concepts from Rabardel’s instrumental theory and Vygotski’s theory of creative imagination. These theoretical frameworks allow us to account for the mediated and creative aspects of narrative activity. Based on analyses of educational situations and on these concepts, a model of narrative activity (NAM) is proposed and illustrated. It includes four main phases: exploration, inspiration, production and sharing. Narrative activity is a way for subjects to develop their creative resources. To contribute to this, teachers operate at two levels. On the one hand, they help children to operate instrumental geneses at functional and semantic levels. Several types of activity (sensory, descriptive and manipulative) contribute to this. On the other hand, teachers use various media to commit children to constituting a kind of “internal laboratory”. Children are invited to think about variations of tools with which they experiment and to listen to the echos which such variations create in them. These reflexive interpersonal mediations consist in opening the subject’s palette of resources, in widening their possibilities for dissociation and association, and in generating materials which will be useful for their narrative production.

Keywords

• narrative activity
• instruments
• mediations
• educational situations
• creativity