In this contribution we consider the question of culture in Educational Action and Educational Research, as it has been explored in the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD, Sensevy, 2011, 2014 ; Sensevy & Bloor, 2020; CDpE, 2024).

In the first part of this contribution, we build a specific conception of culture, grounded in practical accomplishments of people. This can refer to work as it is carried out in the professions, that can be seen as a paradigm of culture, as involving various forms of crafts.  However, other activities, often not considered as work, can also be regarded as practical accomplishments, and viewed as crafted practices, thus expressing culture. For example, as we will see, the activity of caring for persons is one such activity, which can be considered as one of the many « contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life » (Garfinkel, 1984). We then show the consequences of such a conception of culture as a craft for educational endeavours and research in education. We call practical connoisseurs the people who practice a given craft, and we show how this conception can lead didactic work to seek out and construct an epistemic kinship between the activity of practical connoisseurs and didactic activity. In our view, this kinship leads to the construction of a powerful Knowledge (Hudson et al. 2023 ; Wegner et al, 2022) based on the continuity of activities in the culture and on what teachers can make students capable of.

In the second part of this contribution, we show how educational research can promote cooperative designs, in which researchers work together with teachers, in a culture of cooperation. We present the JATD principles that underpin these cooperative designs, which we refer to as "Cooperative Engineering". We also show how this cooperation between teachers and researchers is based on the joint construction of epistemic kinship between the activities of practical connoisseurs and didactic activities, as explained above.

In the third part of this paper, we concretize the above analyses through two potential exemplars (Kuhn, 1977) of Cooperative Engineering, at Elementary School and at Kindergarten.

The first potential exemplar is the DEEC project (https://blog.inspe-bretagne.fr/anr-deec-ace/en/home/)  in which teachers and researchers worked together in a cooperative engineering research in which they co-designed mathematical sequences through the system of principles previously revealed. One of the aims of the DEEC project is to determine the effectiveness of a problem-solving unit at primary school level (grades 2 and 3). One of the main conjectures of our team is that mathematical effectiveness at school has to be based on teaching designs that enable students to get acquainted with the culture of mathematicians, through a specific balance between direct teaching (Kirschner et al., 2006) and inquiry-based learning (Hmelo-Silver, 2007).
The second potential exemplar takes place within a Cooperative Engineering in an Associated Educational Place (LéA, in French) with the French Institute of Education (IFE). Kindergarten students (age 2-3-4-5) engage in imitation workshops, wherein they re-enact a lullaby initially demonstrated to them by a student's mother (a childcare worker). They first learn to rock, to sing, and then, in a subsequent phase, to create bodily and linguistic representations of this song. Our aim is to analyse how this type of didactic process can help us understand how language and culture can be transmitted when they are “put into practice” and “represented”.

In the final part of the paper we summarize the preceding analysis. We then propose reflections on the concept of intelligence of that could be fostered by this conception of culture and education, with a view to reconstructing the Form of Schooling.

The methodology underlying our contribution is based in particular on the development of hypermedia systems for describing and documenting practice, which we call PTAHS (Picture-Text-Audio Hybrid Systems). First of all, it involves filming practice, primarily classroom sessions, but also interviews with students, teachers, researchers and students' parents, in which these people are questioned about the knowledge at the heart of the didactic activities. Secondly, the films are worked on and edited using software that highlights the important aspects of what was filmed for the research team. In the third stage, the films are annotated collectively by the members of the cooperative engineering team, using specific software from Huma-Num, a platform of services for digital research data in Humanities and Social Sciences (https://humanid.huma-num.fr/). The research team is also participating in the testing and improvement of this software. This collective documentation enables all the members of the engineering team to achieve epistemic solidarity, i.e. to work together on the same problem (gaining a better understanding of a given practical aspect in order to be able to improve it), in a perspective of continuous improvement (Sandoval et al., 2024). The aim is therefore to build up what we call epistemic solidarity between all the members of Cooperative Engineering. Such epistemic solidarity is first and foremost the product of a method focused on practical achievements. It is also inseparably ethical and political, since it constructs a profound equality between the members of cooperative engineering. Finally, it is epistemological, since it makes the common intelligence of practice the cement of the collective thought that Cooperative Engineering represents. Through our methodological work, we are developing an epistemology of research centred on the ascent from the abstract to the concrete (Marx, 2012; Ilyenkov, 1982; Engeström et al., 2012), based on exemplars. This method enables us to give concrete form to each of the theoretical notions we use in a specific practice. In this way, a theoretical notion (for example, the epistemic kinship between the activity of practical connoisseurs and didactic activity, or the epistemic solidarity between members of an engineering team or between students) is first described in some relatively abstract way. Then, thanks to the joint elaboration of PTAHS by the research team, and through the collective annotation of these PTAHS, these notions are documented and thus conceptualised with reference to the exemplars constituted by these PTHAS.

In conclusion, we highlight the following elements. 1) A new conception of culture as a craft which should be placed at the heart of didactic activity. Education thus comes closer to the words of Charles Péguy: "The teacher must ensure the representation of culture", culture that is not made up of more or less abstract meanings, but is grasped in the understanding of the activity of the practical connoisseur of a craft. 2) Our research focuses primarily on exemplars, which, following Kuhn (1977), we understand as the public representation of a particular way of working on a practical problem. We thus propose both the epistemological and methodological notion of an epistemology of paradigmatic analogy, since it is in the analogy between the different exemplars that we gain a better understanding of practice in order to be able to transform and reinvent it. It is also, in a sense, this analogy between examples, in the way they build on each other, that creates human culture. 3) Our project is to link i) the epistemic kinship between the activity of the practical connoisseurs of a craft and the didactic activity, and ii) the epistemic solidarity between the members of a thought collective (be it cooperative engineering or a class). This link is based on a conception of intelligence as an "intelligence of" what is practically achieved. We will try to show that the construction and improvement of this "intelligence of" benefits considerably from epistemic solidarity. 4) We will show that this joint construction of epistemic kinship and epistemic solidarity presupposes a reconstruction of the classical Form of Schooling, in which students have to answer questions they have not asked themselves, towards an inquiry Form of Schooling, in which they get deeply acquainted with culture in order to be able to reinvent it.

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