Faced with the challenges that mass-higher education , the so-called new audiences and vocational training imply, sociology at University is particularly exposed and the teaching of this subject seemed, in our opinion, to be offering full scope to our study. Indeed, we know very little about the experience of teachers in front of students and about the way they manage to cope to meet the demands of curriculum or the lectures ; such demands may appear either very rigid or quite vague. This field-work study also meets the needs of young teachers who complain about how they feel lonely within the University and who question the quality of their methods of teaching . The theoretical reference frame is that of cognitive ergonomics( Theureau, 2004) and of sociology of labour ( Bidet, 2006). The objectives were to analyze the activity by giving priority to the point of view of the speaker in order to track down the elements of the context, his/ her cultural background etc, which are part and parcel of the organization of the teaching in class ( either as positive or negative elements). These idiosyncrasic experiments were compared in order to check the existence or not of invariants or regularities during the lectures of unexperienced teachers. This qualitative study was led within the framework of a research group at the University of Western Brittany ( France) , with young teachers in sociology in the Sports department ( STAPS) and the department of business studies ( AES).

Tow kinds of materials have been collected : at first video and audio recording of the teacher’s activity during the lesson ( three lessons running); then a self – confrontation interview with the teacher after the lesson. Data analysis consisted to cut the flow of activity in Elementary Units of Meaning (EUMs) that the teacher used to think and act. The data was analysed in three stages: a) the construction of a two-level protocol, confronting the observation and interviews data, b) the identification of the UUMs, and, c) the identification of the series and archetypal series (larger units which gather the EUMs of which the concerns are the same).

The comparison of the teacher's courses of action during the lessons show archetype structures of the course of action and that these structures are indissociable of situations’ characteristics. The results bring to light that the dynamics of the course of action of the teachers is translated by the fluctuations in a bundle of concerns archetypes. These concerns are muddled and updated in connection with the interpretation that every teacher makes of the activity of the students. At certain moments, the concerns archetypes can appear as competitive and bring to the foreground an uncomfortable lived dilemma (transmission of a scientific contents and an educational imperative to take into account the heterogeneousness of the public for example). This one is often resolved by the adoption of a judged solution as little effective but less little expensive in term of stake in work.