In the history of the modern school systems in Europe, the early development of subject didactics may be traced back to 1) the building of “disciplines” (school subjects) as social organisations aimed at producing and diffusing knowledge and 2) the empowerment of the secondary school teachers through professional associations (Schneuwly, 2011). Subject didactics were thus born as practices of teaching a given discipline and attempts of theorising such practices. Against this background, it may be argued that the mass schooling reforms in the 60’s -70’s in France and their unexpected side effects have prompted a significant turn in the building of a scientific field gathering the “didactiques des disciplines" (Caillot, 2007; Ligozat & Leutenegger, 2012), as descriptive and explicative research domains about the irreducible role of the knowledge content in teaching and learning. In this turn, research in didactics of mathematics played a peculiar role in theorising 1) the knowledge transposition process inherent to the didactical institutions (Chevallard, 1985/1991; 2007) and 2) the didactical contract as a framework for understanding the teacher and the students’ behaviors towards a content (Brousseau, 1997). Nevertheless, in the French-speaking countries, subject didactics went on growing within the realms of the school subjects and producing fragmented research foci about teaching, learning and knowledge content. Based on the challenges that the francophone Association for Comparative Researches in Didactics faces since its creation in 2006 (Ligozat, Coquidé, Marlot, Verscheure & Sensevy, 2014), this paper positions the “didactique comparée” (comparative didactics) as a reconstructive move drawing on certain conceptual frameworks developed in the earlier “subject didactics” and against the background of socio-cultural approaches of knowledge construction and learning. The aim is to provide a better understanding of the ternary relation [teacher - student(s) – content], across the various forms of institutional contexts in which teaching and learning is purposively organised and across the frontiers of the school subjects.

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