La construction conjointe d’un observatoire et d’un objet théorique : l’exemple du récit d’expérience et de l’espace d’actions

Abstract

The aim of this article, based on a study conducted with a class of 26 students engaged in an annual “Arctic Kayak” project, is twofold. The first is to present the dynamics of joint construction, going back and forth between observation analysis and theoretical concept research. The second is to introduce two new concepts that might benefit the course-of-action research program. The first concept, “story of experience”, helps design and conduct observation research aiming to collect and analyze the experience of large groups of actors over a relatively long period of time. Stories of experience offer a condensed description of students’ individual experiences during the kayak classes, providing material that allows multiple angles of analysis. The second concept is that of “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 (2011).

Keywords

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