Theoretical backgrounds: The synthesis of available research on gender in education reveals shared conclusions about the inequalities in the treatment of girls and boys at school. Research shows that French schools participate in the reproduction or even the construction of inequalities between girls and boys (Collet, 2016). This presentation focuses, within a didactique research approach (Amade-Escot, Elandoulsi & Verscheure, 2015; Amade-Escot & Verscheure, 2016; Verscheure & Amade-Escot, 2007) on how teacher and students interactions participate in the production of gendered content. In particular in PE, where “since the demands of every sport involve a particular balance between force and skill, it can be suggested that the more it is force that is decisive, the more a physically dominating hegemonic masculinity can be publicly celebrated” (Whitson, 1994, p. 363). The paper, built on the findings of a case study related to rugby, discusses the concept of ‘gender positioning’ as a means to describe the dynamics of the differential didactic contract which is “… not implicitly negotiated with all classroom students but with some groups of students which have diverse standings in the classroom” (Schubauer-Leoni, 1996, p. 160). Didactic research has pointed that gendered content is co-constructed through classroom interactions and that various gender positioning influences this co-construction (Verscheure & Amade-Escot, 2007; Amade-Escot, et al., 2015).

Aiming at struggling against the inequalities "in the making" in class, that is to say the current modalities of the practices of transmission and appropriation of the knowledge and the nature of the selected knowledge (Poggi & Brière, 2013), the innovative research design articulates an analysis of the practices of teaching and learning in class with a strategy of accompanying their change. The notion of change is seen here as the transition from one state to another: the modification of the relations between a subject and his environment involves the modification of the elements of the environment, as well as the transformation of individuals who become different by modifying the context (Bedin, 2013).

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