The continuing expansion of educational research in Europe, incorporating most disciplines within the academic world, is promising. On one hand, the varied theoretical and methodological approaches represent strengths of the field, because they provide complementary orientations and allow to better understand the complexity of educative phenomena. On the other hand, this diversity is also a sign of weaknesses, because educational research is less visible. The results of scientific productions are globally little considered by the politicians and the practitioners (Dezutter, 2013). For example, the low participation of the practitioners during research congresses shows how intricate it is to move educational research closer to everyday practice. Can we consider that the educational research community has failed to develop an interdependent relationship between forms of teacher education and forms of school education?

The evolution of the teacher education models in the European context (Altet, 1996) highlights the complex role of teachers as mediators between students and a rapidly evolving world. The teachers have to acquire numerous professional competencies, which require a culture of reflection and research from a lifelong learning perspective (Caena & Margiotta, 2010). The European researchers must thus be encouraged to continue today a challenge: the innovation in teacher education in relation with the model of the reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983).

This study focuses on research on didactics, in physical education (PE). Didactics of PE has developed in France in relation with other didactics, particularly didactics of mathematics (the Theory of Didactic Situations, Brousseau, 1997 ; the Anthropological Theory of Didactic, Chevallard, 1985). These theories, centered on the nature of knowledge, have progressively evolved with the emergence of the joint action theory (Sensevy, 2010), more centered on the diffusion process. This theory, used also in the context of PE (Amade-Escot, 2006), considers we can describe the co-construction of knowledge by a teacher and students as developing in games : “Learning to act in a specific part of the social world is learning to play a certain game in situations embedded in institutions” (Sensevy, 2010).

A structure of particular descriptors allows to describe the learning game: the didactic contract/milieu doublet ; the genesis triplet (mesogenesis ; chronogenesis ; topogenesis) ; the game quadruplet (defining, devolving, monitoring and managing the certainty/uncertainty dialectic, institutionalizing).

This communication aims at illustrating, by using a comparative approach, how the joint action theory allows the researcher to understand the decision making of the teacher (Brière & Musard, 2012). But we wish also show that it could help the teachers to decode the didactic interactions in situ and to question their intervention.

How do the student teachers organize the learning games for their students during PE lessons ? Which sense do they construct during post-interviews when they analyze their activity and those of students ? What is generic/specific according to the student teachers ?

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