In this paper, I first focus on the notion of cooperative engineering (Sensevy, Quilio, Forest, & Morales, 2013; Gruson, 2014), which one may consider as a particular kind of design-based research, in which teachers and researchers share an engineer stance, against a common background of educational ends. In order to design such cooperatives engineering, teachers and researchers need to work out a particular kind of didactic transposition (Chevallard, 2007) in which the didactic activity (which is modelized in the Joint Action Theory in Didactics as learning games) is thought of by reference to epistemic games (Sensevy, 2012; Loquet, this workshop) which one may conceive of as a specific modelization of the practical connoisseurship of the practice being taught. In that way, a fundamental objective of the cooperative engineers (teachers and researchers) consists of the nurturing of learning games by epistemic games, i.e. the nurturing of didactic activity by some fundamental features of the practice being taught, that bring the didactic activity to a form of kinship with connoisseur’s practice. Through this perspective, one may see research practice in didactics both as an anthropological science, in which researchers attempt to understand culture and its specifications, and an engineering science, in which researchers propose better ways of achieving educational ends by elaborating better didactic designs. In that way, educational sciences enacts a reciprocal process between transforming and understanding, in which one attempts to understand the educational practice to transform it, and to transform the educational practice to understand it. With this respect, the educational science, as science of culture, shares with sciences of nature the dialectical relationship between transforming and understanding. In this process, the educational science, as science of culture, needs to get rid out of the fact-value dichotomy (Putnam, 2002) and to integrate normative issues in the research endeavor.

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