The rise of comparative didactics in French speaking countries appears in the late 90's. With the term “didactics” we hereby include research about teaching and learning in relation to the content covered in school subjects. The general contention of the French-speaking tradition for comparative didactics is to develop a comprehensive science of the teaching and learning phenomena from the empirical studies of classroom events. A strand for comparative didactics aims at discussing the relationships between the theoretical constructions born within subject didactics. As an example, Amade-Escot & Venturini (2009) have shown how the concept of "didactic milieu" is relevant to account for classroom events both in physical education and science education. Comparative didactics puts the focus on the teacher and the student agency when the content is brought into play in the classroom (Ligozat & Leutenegger, 2012). In this line, comparative didactics is at the core of the Teaching Traditions and Learning project involving Swiss, French and Swedish educational researchers. In this presentation, we will relate the categories for analyzing the joint actions of teacher and the students (didactic contract, milieu, mesogenesis, topogenesis, chronogenesis: Ligozat & Schubauer-Leoni, 2009; Sensevy, Mercier, Schubauer-Leoni, Ligozat, Perrot, 2005) to certain categories developed in the pragmatist approach of classroom discourse analysis in Sweden (Practical Epistemology Analysis and Epistemological Moves Analysis: Wickman & Östman, 2002; Ligozat, Wickman & Hamza, 2011; Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman, 2006). Through examples of classroom events recorded in gymnastics lessons in France and physics lesson (the state of the matter) in Switzerland, we will characterize some generic and specific dimensions of the teaching practice, using both analytical frameworks. The purpose is to explore their potential to model some manners of teaching connected to the teaching traditions related to each subject.

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