This paper tries a discussion of the descriptive – normative tension, which is embedded in the analysis of classroom practices performed in the field of comparative didactics in the Francophone research. According to Schneuwly (2011), subjects didactics have grown for a long time as prescriptive-normative discourses strongly tied to school subjects, and developing within schools and teaching training colleges among teachers, curriculum makers, teacher trainers, etc. In this approach, each subject didactics aims at reflecting on what should be taught and provide some guidance to teach certain specific contents. But during the last three decades, under the pressure of transformation of teacher education in universities, subject didactics have also developed as a descriptive-comprehensive stance. It provides theoretical models for understanding and explaining the dynamics of teaching and learning about some specific contents. The development of comparative didactics in the 2000’s is a furthering of this descriptive-comprehensive stance towards an anthropological approach of knowledge transactions in classroom practices (Ligozat, Amade-Escot & Östman, 2015). Our discussion is based on an empirical study of the implementation of reading circles to support low achieving students in reading of novels in a pre-vocational school (Monnier & Weiss, to appear). In analyzing the joint actions of the teacher and the students in two different groups of students, we found some differences in the management of the students’ difficulties by the teacher and we could build contradictory interpretations of the teacher’s decisions. We explore the issues of our analyses in terms of the nature of the normativity involved in each case. First, the description of any human action is inseparable of the characterization of the social norms that organize the participants’ actions (Bazin, 1998). In the French Didactics, the concept of didactic contract captures the set of the evolving expectations and norms according to which the teacher and the students adjust their lines of action toward the definition of the content to be learnt (Ligozat, Lundqvist and Amade-Escot, 2017). Second, teaching and learning are joint actions that mutually affect each other’s in a transactional way (Dewey & Bentley, 1946). It is not possible to describe actions out of their consequences on the participants; but more over, in the classroom there are also consequences on the content taught and learnt. Examining those consequences unavoidably lead us to a critical analysis on the actions taken by the participants in relation to the curriculum norms to which they are subjected.

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