'On the first school day, the pupils arrived in the classroom and took place where they would like to. And then I saw all the boys seating on one side of the classroom and all the girls on the other side' (Patrick, Primary school teacher in the first grade). 'When I would build up working groups, I would take into account the level of the pupils (high/low) but I would never set up the dyads with regards to the sex of the pupils. That’s funny! However, I must say that it is not an issue in this school because of the cultivated background of the pupils' (Sophie, Primary school teacher in the first grade). Patrick and Sophie are teaching in the same primary school in France. This transcript illustrates that gender-based division is already part of daily school life in the first school year, despite of the social background of children. It also highlights that coeducation seems to be rarely understood by the teachers from a perspective of gender equality, as a cooperation between boys and girls. In order to reflect coeducation as a way to promote gender equality, we propose to apprehend coeducation as a boy-girl didactical joint action. The joint action is defined as a cooperative and coordinated action. Equitable means that the boy and the girl would build up a knowledge which would be as similar as possible to the practice of the knowledge owner. We link gender studies concepts to teaching and learning situations analyzed from a didactics point of view. However, we do not attend to highlight how male domination would take place in the classroom. Indeed, our study focuses on the empowerment of both male and female pupils. Our research question is the following: what are the didactics conditions for a boy-girl equitable joint action in reading and writing teaching-learning situations in the first school year? Our methodology to answer this question consists of: video records of boy-girl dyads writing a story, interviews with the teacher, an interview with each pupil of the dyad, the written records of the pair group. We analyze the data from the perspective of the joint action theory in didactics. Our contribution will be based on an empirical extract showing a boy-girl pair group writing a common short text.

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