Research methodologies including collective work between researchers, teachers and other educational actors have been developing since the 1950s, both in France and internationally. These methodologies, which are very varied, are currently meeting growing interest. They include trends such as action research (Sussman et Evered, 1978), design-based research (Cobb et al., 2003, Collins et al., 2004) and cooperative didactic engineering (Gruson, In press; Joffredo-Le Brun et al., 2018; Sensevy et al., 2013). Nevertheless, the analysis of this collective work raises methodological and epistemological questions that remain insufficiently explored.

Many researchers, working within the framework of the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD), are currently engaged in several cooperative engineering. In order to report on how engineering work is carried out, these researchers (notably, CDpE, in press; Gruson, 2018; Joffredo-Le Brun, 2016; Morellato, 2017; Perraud, 2018) propose to use and specify some theoretical tools borrowed to JATD to analyse transactions between teachers, researchers and trainers.
For this presentation, we propose to discuss the notions of epistemic dialogue and epistemic equilibration we use to describe the engineering dialogue and, more specifically, the way knowledge circulates between the different participants during the engineering work.

To do so, we rely on two empirical examples. The first one focuses on a research named Arithmetic and Comprehension at Elementary School (ACE), which aims at building a mathematics curriculum for the French First and Second Grades. For this research, four French research teams were responsible for the production of one part of the whole curriculum. Among these parts, one of them was designed within a cooperative engineering. This engineering consisted of two spheres. Sphere 1 gathered a multi-categorical team (PhD students, teachers of the study classes, researchers, teacher-trainers, mentors) and sphere 2 was composed of a wide range of experimental classes. In this presentation, we will analyse the engineering dialogue occurring in relation with a problem identified by the teachers: the introduction of the number line. The second example relies on the PILCO research, PILCO standing for "Interlanguage Practices in High School in Oral Comprehension". The objective of the PILCO research was to co-construct, with teachers and trainers, training situations in order to identify what the most favourable activities are to develop students' skills in oral comprehension (Roussel & al., 2017). For this research, the cooperative engineering team was composed of researchers in language learning, language regional inspectors and teacher-trainers working with two teams of language teachers, who teach, respectively, English, German, and Spanish in two high schools located in Brittany, France.

Both these research projects were part of the network of Associated Places of Education (LéA) at the French Institute of Education (IFE).

The main questions explored in this presentation are the following: how, in the engineering dialogue, can a shared background gradually be built between the different participants? Are the notions of epistemic relation and epistemic equilibration likely to account for the way the different participants’ backgrounds, whose joint action seeks to solve didactic problems, are mutually combined and enriched?

To study the question of cooperation between researchers and teachers in the ACE project, we set up a specific methodology to collect and analyse data over a long period of time (one year). This data is composed of the different exchanges between the two spheres and the comments posted on the ACE website and the transcription of the working meetings. We selected specific data related to some object and grouped them together to constitute a state a set of signs from a plurality of observed facts (Sensevy, 1999; Leutenegger, 2000) that allowed us to reconstruct the reality of the engineering dialogue. As for the PILCO research, we will rely on data coming from the verbatims of the working meetings, some of which were entirely filmed, as well as from answers to a questionnaire filled in by the members of the PILCO research.

In maths, the study of the engineering dialogue shows how the collective enquiry around a problem of practice, the introduction of the number line, enabled the participants to share experiences and thus to progressively construct a common background. Indeed, the repetition of crucial statements gradually gained consensus and then occupied a central position in the engineering dialogue over time. We can say that the joint action between teachers and researchers leads to a rethinking of the content of the sessions and thus to a co-design of the curriculum. In foreign languages, our analyses show that the work on the knowledge involved in high-level and a low-level listening processes and the joint designing of training sessions for the students (Roussel et al., 2017) made it possible to move from a quite unbalanced epistemic relationship, or a form of asymmetrical relationship between participants, at the beginning of the research to a certain form of epistemic equilibration, or to say it differently a quite symmetrical relationship. In doing so, it highlights the mutual enrichment of knowledge drawn from experience and research. In both cases, we show that in the epistemic cooperative relationship, teachers and researchers learn from each other. Teachers developed appropriate solutions based on concrete elements from their experience. As for researchers, they drew on these concrete elements to reconceptualize the issue present in the problem of practice. Finally, these studies show that persistent problems of practice can be overcome thanks to collective work, which can contribute to improving teaching-learning situations both in mathematics and foreign languages.

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