In this presentation we discuss a methodological attempt to analyze the scope of the content really taught (Amade-Escot, 2006) and the manners of teaching (Lundqvist, Almqvist & Östman, 2012) within PE school practices. This study belongs to an international project which aims to compare teachers’ practices in three countries: « Comparative didactics investigations of the interplay between manners of teaching and learning within science and physical education and health in Sweden, Switzerland and France ».

Within this project, the need of a tertium comparationis that allows comparing different PE practices that are culturally embedded brings us to focus on a particular observational object: the status and didactic functions of “demonstrations” as teaching tools. The methodological attempt was conducted in France with a female PE teacher, during a gymnastic unit. The didactical approach analyzes teaching and learning by taking account of the complexity of a ternary system: teacher, pupils, knowledge (Amade-Escot, 2005, 2006). Manners of teaching  (Lundqvist, Almqvist & Östman, 2012) are identified through knowledge content and didactic procedures such as they are observable in the teacher and student’s joint action (Venturini & Amade-Escot, 2013) with regard to the feature of the French curriculum related to gymnastic. One can said with regard to the logic of the practice that Gymnastic is a “morphocinetic” activity that is a physical activity in which the production of body movements is a central feature, by opposition to strategic sports like basketball for example. A literature review in the field of PE let us consider that the ways of using « demonstration » when teaching “morphocinetic” activities may reveal what is the teacher’s targeted knowledge and her/his learning conceptions. Thus, demonstration is considered as a professional gesture that has potential to document teacher’s practical epistemology.

During this preliminary study, the methodological attempt aims at documenting different questions: What is the knowledge targeted when teacher uses demonstration? What is demonstrated? Who is demonstrating? How? When? From where in the gymnasium? To whom? What are the forms and the didactical functions of teacher’s demonstrations gestures? In terms of content? In terms of learning? Which discourse is associated with the demonstrative gestures? How demonstrations belong to didactic techniques that might reveal her/his manners of teaching?

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