Key words: joint action; learning game; schooling and non-schooling learning; physical activities, body knowledge. The questions of learning and teaching are always confronted with the command of the content knowledge proposed by the teacher to the students. Didactical research takes into account the relationships within the teacher, students and knowledge triplet, taken as a dynamical system (Brousseau, 1997). Considering that a given content knowledge, here studied in physical activities, typifies social interactions between teacher and students, we try to clarify the choice of contents at stake in various situations, observed in schooling and non-schooling institutions. Our analysis is part of a didactical research program which broaches those various situations from the angle of the teacher/students’ “joint” action theory (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007). In order to contribute to this theory, we hypothesize that interpretation of classroom events is the concern of both: 1) “external” processes, such as the teacher’s preparation of his lessons and his practical epistemology in which a theory of knowledge is embedded, which determine essential orientations; 2) the teacher’s inventiveness in regulating the students’ physical activities, who determines “learning games” in his classroom on a day-to-day basis. The concept of “learning game” (Sensevy et al, 2005) is used in order to show how the three-level description of the “joint” action (teacher, students and knowledge) are connected to each other. This paper aims at identifying various manifestations of “joint” action, through the comprehensive study of three situations of physical, sports and artistic activities, in schooling institutions (continuing education for teachers) and non-schooling institutions (special education for the disabled, preschool education).

Empirical analysis of videotaped episodes, selected in corporal expression, dance and aquatic activities, are presented, using a set of categories such as “mesogenesis”, “chronogenesis”, and “topogenesis” (Mercier et al., 2000; Sensevy et al, 2000; Mercier et al., 2005). The generic relevance of these categories is examined through physical activities with body knowledge at stake (Loquet et al., 2007), and thus the necessity to specify them in order to understand how the content knowledge may shape the patterns of the “joint” action.

We examine in what form(s) the “joint” action is describable within those institutions, according to two genericity levels: the first one makes it possible to compare both schooling and non-schooling learning; the second one makes it possible to sketch out a model common to non-schooling learning. The interest we have in forms of teaching constructed outside schooling traditions brings us to keep at a distance, which in return, enables us to better assess the more familiar schooling practices.