Following a symposium organized last year in Istanbul by Gruson and Loquet, this new symposium brings together researchers from four countries, France, Sweden, Germany and the UK, and seeks to develop mutual understanding between educational researchers with interests in teaching and learning practices at different levels of the education system and involving specific subject areas. Despite the efforts of the researchers involved in The EERA network on Didactics - Learning and Teaching to develop international dialogue, current research in didactics across Europe still demonstrates great diversity, parallel to diversity of instructional practices, initial teacher education and didactic theory construction. Even if this diversity proves the vitality of the field, we think bringing more cohesion to our field represents an important step that would contribute to reinforcing educational research and the quality of teaching and learning. One of the objectives of this symposium is to continue our common efforts to go beyong fragmentation (Hudson and Meyer, 2011) and to reinforce the basis for productive dialogue between researchers focusing on educational settings.

To do so, the coordinators of this symposium have engaged researchers representing various theoretical and methodological traditions in the analysis of the same data : a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) lesson during which physical education, and more particularly dancing, is taught in English, both by the French class teacher and an American dance instructor.

At the 2013 ECER conference, this data was analyzed from the point of view of Joint Action Theory in Didactics (Sensevy, 2011), focusing more particularly on the semiosis issue, i.e. the way signs are built and deciphered in teaching-learning processes (Gruson & Loquet, 2013).

The originality of this new symposium is to show how researchers coming from a variety of disciplinary homes and theoretical and methodological traditions approach the same data focusing on the dynamics of verbal and corporal interactions in relation with the content knowledge involved.

In bringing various “voices” of multiple theoretical and methodological traditions into productive dialogue with each other, we seek to create a common theoretical background in a manner that is beneficial to the participating researchers and to progress in the field.

After having presented the theoretical and methodological traditions each researcher or team of researchers come from, their contribution will focus on the way they have addressed the following questions:
What do you see as “key-moments” in this lesson, either in terms of learning or in terms of collaboration? Why did you choose those particular moments? What are the assumptions you are making, either about learning or about collaboration? How can the joint action between the teachers and the students be qualified during these moments? What is the system of objects at work? How can the semiotic system or the multimodality involved in these moments be described?

Our program for the two (or three) parts of the symposium is as follows: firstly we will present the origin of our common work and the data on which each presenter will focus. Secondly, each presenter will provide his/her contribution. In the final part of the symposium, two discussants, Brian Hudson and Monique Loquet, will comment on the work done. In doing so, they will examine to what extent the different contributions, rooted in different traditions, can help us to reflect on our own tradition and on the way multivocal analysis can help us to create common ground in a manner that transcends yet leverages our differences.