This communication will concern the preparatory phase of a vaster and long term project which has been conceived in three layers : 1. Identify the singularity of a teacher’s educational practice. 2. Analyze the influence which the teachers’ relationship to knowledge excercises on this singuarity. 3. Describe and understand the way according to which the teacher’s relationship to knowledge has been built up through his personal and professional biography. During this communication, we shall concentrate on the two first points. E.g. Topic Two professional teachers teaching the same notion at the same school level don’t procede in the same manner, even if they have had the same training and even if they operate in similar environments. The differences might be notably due to : • the curriculum contents : even if these are specified by the program, there will always be a margin of interpretation ; • the didactic transposition (Chevallard, 1998) of these contents: for instance, the way according to which the teacher will translated these contents into lessons or into exercises ; • the suggested teaching method in itself: even it is tightly associated to the proposed exercises, the teacher will always in a certain manner adapt not only the objectives, but the organization of time, of space and working material, as well as the composition of the learning groups according to his perception of the learning progression ; • the didactic contract (for example, the status of the question, the debate, the error, according to Brousseau, 1986) ; • the relationship between teacher and pupils, between pupils, the class dynamics ; • the learning climate (tension, cooperation, humor, a.s.o.) ; • the teacher’s representation about the knowledge he has to teach as well as the suggested methods. Conceptual end theorical framwork and state of the art According to Charlot (1997), the subject builds up his knowledge in tight relationship wih the surrounding reality. Knowledge is thus built up through the person’s activity with regard to himself, to the others, with regard to theoretical knowledges, objects, practices. The concept about relationship to « knowledge & learning » has been developed inside the Frenchspeaking research community (Charlot, 1997, 2006; Rochex, 1995; Beillerot, 2000) and is difficult to translate into English. The three authors connect knowledge and learning because they assert that the subjects’ representations and the attitudes do not only concerne the knowledge (it’s history, use, value), but also it’s mode of appropriation by the persons, the processes which favor or prevent it’s construction, the work which is needed for learning, a.s.o. The relationship to the knowledge and learning includes conceptions, representations, but also attitudes and values: it contains all the intellectual, emotional and practical relationships which an individual maintains with the knowledge as a whole or with a particular knowledge. During the preparatory phase of our research, we aim at building up a typology of the possible relationships to knowledge & learning which might influence the teaching practices. On the behalf of our first exploratory interviews, we have for instance identified the following dimensions : • the meaning and the interest of the taught knowledge ; • the feeling of personal mastery of this knowledge ; • the state of this knowledge (certain vs incertain, debatable versus indisputable) ; • the part of discovery and questioning in the proposed activity (strong versus weak) ; • the role of the teacher (mediator versus distributor of the knowledge). The purpose of this preparatory phase is to test, to clarify and to complete these dimensions

We shall conduct comprehensive interviews (Kaufmann, 2001) with ten primary teachers working in public schools inside the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland). On the behalf of their description of a recent teaching sequence, these teachers will be asked to analyze this sequence in order to put in evidence their relationship to knowledge & learning.

Research question and objective There are many possibilities to explain these differences. The present research is based upon a comprehensive and qualitative analysis of the teachers’ explanation about the way in which they organized and experienced a specific lesson ; the main part of the interview is specifically focussed on the teachers’ perception of the relationship existing between knowledge & learning. I will present my first outcomes of the first research period as well as the dimensions which guide the second research period.