The research we will present is part of a research project called e-FRAN1 IDEE (Digital Interactions for Education and Teaching) conducted in Rennes, France, in relation with a group studying Collectives of Teachers Groups and Resources for Students' Autonomy (CERAD). It studied the issues of digital appropriation by teachers and identified uses that can promote the development of student autonomy (Kistansas, 2013 ; Johnson & Davies, 2014). Part of this research is based, within the framework of collaborative research (Lieberman, 1986), on the collective design, between teachers and researchers, of an open educational resource (OER) in English in the manner of cooperative engineering (Sensevy, Forest, Quilio & Morales-Ibarra, 2013; Gruson, 2019; Quéré, 2019).
The aim of the group was to produce a digital educational resource that supports the development of year 9 students' autonomy. The following working principles (Sensevy & Bloor, 2019) have been adopted. The first principle is the principle of quasi-symmetry: all the members of the group, despite their different skills, work together to design activities. The second principle is the sharing of common purposes, such as the knowledge at stake, or the conception of a digital resource that would be likely to enable an "autonomous" understanding of the English language by the students. The third principle is the assumption of differences: the past experience of the teachers in the group is recognized as a particular expertise that can feed the design work, while, for example, one of the doctoral students is conducting specific research on autonomy. Finally, the last principle is an engineer's posture that all the participants adopt throughout the collective work, building together the activities for the classes. The monitoring of this collective was carried out over two years, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.
To understand how the didactic activity takes place during the implementation of the resource, we use the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD). In the JATD, the concepts of didactic contract and milieu (CDPE, 2019) help define a strategic system, which is the strategic system of teaching and learning. These concepts are closely articulated. The contract can be described as what is already known by the students and the milieu as what is to be known.
Thus, we study the following research questions. To what extent do the different iterations carried out within a cooperative engineering allow to densify the knowledge worked on ? How do digital resources support problematization of an activity in a sufficiently resistant didactic environment?
To answer these questions, we have analyzed a particular activity, in which students design interactive computer games for their classmates, on the basis of summaries of Conan Doyle’s novels. Thanks to our theoretical framework, we have conducted an analysis of the didactical itransactions during these lessons. We will present the results of our analyses during our presentation.
1 http://www.education.gouv.fr/cid94346/appel-a-projet-e-fran.html