This thesis proposes, through collaborative research (Anadón, 2007; Considère & Liénart, 2016; Desgagné et al, 2001; Pelt & Poncelet, 2011; Sanchez & Monod-Ansaldi, 2015) to take an interest in the issue of the mobility and anchoring of Travellers in Geography at vocational high school.

 The term 'Voyageurs' refers to people from the French Traveller community. They are also called Manouche , Gens du Voyage or Gypsy. In this thesis, the term Traveller is used rather than Gens du Voyage because it questions the way in which the  concerned people call themselves, with reference to their spatial anchorage and attachment to the mobile habitat.

In France, Travellers are subject to prejudice and a policy of managing their movements. The law provides for municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants to have a space adapted for Travellers. However, this law is little respected. Travellers find it increasingly difficult to find dedicated areas, which reduces their mobility (Bergeon, 2011, 2014; Bettendorff, 2017; Clavé-Mercier dir & Cossée, 2019; Dukic & Dhume, 2011; Humeau, 1995), 

   The presence of this community in the neighbourhoods and the schooling of Traveller children brings reactions at school.  This issue has a strong social stake, by the omnipresence of a political-mediatic vocabulary to characterise these populations and by the spread of depreciative prejudices. Added to this are educational issues: how to teach alterity? How do schools and curricula grant (or not) a place to Travelling students?

              This research proposes to take up the question of Travellers in the classroom through the prism of the ordinary social question (Vergnolle-Mainar, 2020).  It can be defined as a questionning  on the relationship between social knowledge, such as the media, and school knowledge (Simonneaux & Legardez, 2006). It questions the territory close to the pupil and aims to address the commitment of actors within territories from a citizen perspective.  The question arises in class, when pupils express themselves. The territory and the stakes of the presence of Travellers thus burst into the classroom, questioning the relationship between the school and its territories.

The research involves teachers of Literature-History-Geography in Essonne and aims to develop didactic approaches to enable pupils to understand the mobility of Travellers, to go beyond their representations and to develop a critical questioning of the world.

 It is based on a qualitative research methodology, one aspect of which is the construction of teaching methods (field trips, interviews). Experiential geography" thus thinks of a renewal of teaching situations by questioning the passage from experience to knowledge. A course scenario is therefore based on 4 phases: Immersion, Investigation, Institutionalisation, Implementation (Leininger-Frézal, 2019).  It is a question of articulating the knowledge derived from this experience with school knowledge through the concrete experience of the pupils.  With regard to the Travellers' theme, the field trip may be part of the experiential approach.

The objective is that the material designed should allow the pupils to go beyond the representations of the Travellers and to question the world.

Working on an ordinary social issue in geography leads to a particular methodology. This collaborative research involves teachers who work in territories that are in touch with the question. This methodological choice stems from my identity - my grandparents have been sedentary travellers since 1997 - my professional status (teacher in a vocational high school) and the desire to develop a pedagogical approach as close as possible to reality. The research is carried out through participant observation (Platt, 1983; Soulé, 2007). My posture is that of a practitioner-researcher (Gaujal, 2016; Schön, 1994). The research field and subject can be described as sensitive (Bouillon et al., 2005; de Sardan, 2004). The objectives are to grasp the question as an object to be taught and to understand the anchoring processes of the Travellers. Semi-directive observations and interviews were therefore carried out with different actors at local level (teachers, politicians, associations) as well as informal interviews with the inhabitants of the reception areas. The survey resulted in a diagnotic of the situation of Travellers in two Essonne municipalities from the point of view of the school systems and links with the local area. The research is oriented towards action and the design of courses aimed at working on the representations of pupils and their spatial practices. This didactic engineering deployed (Artigue, 2002) is based on the following hypothesis: approaching the question of the Travellers through the prism of their anchorage allows to pass from representations to geographical knowledge. The courses have been developed in an experiential approach. The pupils drew up an interview guide which aimed to understand the way of life of the inhabitants of this particular territory (Immersion). Then the students met and interviewed two women living in a reception area in the local area of the vocational school (Investigation). When they returned to class, they recounted what they had experienced, which allowed the teacher to work on the concepts at work (Institutionalisation). Finally, they made a sketch showing an ideal reception area, thus integrating the Travellers into the neighbourhood in which they lived and presented their work to an elected representative. Questionnaires were distributed in order to identify the pupils' representations. Their productions were compiled and analysed and interviews were conducted with the volunteer students. The corpus of this research is made up of data from classes observation : questionnaires from the pupils, their work and interviews conducted with teachers and local actors.

.Interviews with teachers show a willingness to change practices and the way pupils look at alterity. The main purpose of geography are both civic: open-mindedness and openness to other ways of living, and intellectual: understanding the spatialities of Travellers and the organisation of their living places (Barthes, Champollion, et al., 2019;; Reuter, et al., 2013). The questionnaires distributed to the students show that we are dealing with an ordinary social question whose liveliness is obvious from the point of view of representations. For them, Travellers are a category that is subject to wandering and whose symbol is the caravan. The Travellers are a category of people who are forced to wander around, whose symbol is the caravan, "with no fixed abode", "who travel in a caravan", "who go from town to town". The pupils' productions show limited spatial practices: the territory of proximity is perceived in a fragmented way: during the field trip, the pupils are aware of the high school but not of the Travellers' reception area, which is right across the street. The encounter with the inhabitants of this area made them understand that the Other was present. However, the mobile habitat is also a source of incomprehension. The pupils approach the mobile habitat through the prism of sedentary life. They imagine a neighbourhood specific to the Travellers, reproducing what they see among themselves, a neighbourhood that must be protected from nuisances and incivilities.

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