My project focuses on the current confrontation between theory and evidence in some of our educational debates... I would like to put forward a sequence of four arguments : 1. I explore the current way of thinking among policy-makers that an educational research-based teachers training has proven to have failed and that other means for recruiting and educating teachers are to be found. I will take the French and American examples. Economic reasons obviously prevail but they are closely related to a severe assessment of what is usually taught in university education departments. Let us add that students themselves give little praise to their training often described as “too theoritical”. 2. In order to challenge the political decisions to come in favor of either a mere academic education or a call for teachers to come from professional but non-educational backgrounds, we have to assess from the inside what kind of theory we have until now provided for practitioners, ie since education has been organised as a university subject. Are we sure that the current state of educational research really supports and enlightens the understanding and the making of education in our modern countries? Some analysts write that theory never brought any help in conceptualizing and realising education. Moreover it has sometimes added confusion to an already complex phenomenon and practice. I’d also like to refer to a former communication of mine (ECER Geneva 2006) where I, among others, questionned the use and abuse of Piagetian constructivism in the classroom. 3. More positively, I will assume that some hints are given by recent mergings between main philosophical problematics and some trends in psychological research. The second half of the XXth century witnessed a come back of scientific psychology to its fomer humanistic sources. When psychology leaves behind a radical cognitivist point of view for a more cultural one, it becomes obvious that philosophical concepts like intentionnality, meaning, interpretation,etc., are back after a century of painful divorce between psychology and phemonology or hermeneutics, for instance. Might this potential reunion give birth to a new type of research? Indeed the epistemological status of such a theory is still to be questionned, but let us start with its pragmatic value ! 4. As a teacher educator, I would like to assert my point by giving examples of what such a new theorization could bring to the classroom in terms of pedagogical devices and teaching attitudes.

Methods : Readings in psychology and philosophy. Experiencing and conceptualizing teaching experience. Research with fellow researchers in the French thematic educational research network RESEIDA (REcherches sur la Socialisation, l’Enseignement, les Inégalités et les Différenciations dans les Apprentissages / research on socialisation, teaching, inequalities and differenciation in learning)

We will ask, as a conclusion, whether this educational theory could be a suitable challenger for the current threatening denial of any professional university education for teachers.