This symposium emerges from the work of Network 27 on Didactics, Learning and Teaching initiated at the ECER 2006. It brings together researchers from five European universities (University of Dundee, Scotland; Hamburg University and Siegen University, Germany; Brittany Institute of Education and Rennes 2 University, France) willing to study what really happens in classrooms and find common ground so as to overcome fragmentation in the field of research on Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe (Hudson and Meyer, 2011). The symposium aims to present how each European contributor uses notions borrowed from the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD) developed by Sensevy (2011) so as to understand, in a democratic perspective, the teaching and learning process occurring in densely culture-embedded situations.

As cultures transmitted by the school institution are historically- and collectively-built, we consider that to be able to access these cultures, students need the teacher's help. This requires a theoretical framework able to capture the whole system composed of three poles: the teaching pole, the learning pole and knowledge. Thanks to JATD, we observe this system by focusing on the on-going transactions between the teacher and the students in relation with the knowledge involved. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, we base our studies on different school subjects: mathematics, physical education (PE) and English as a foreign language (ESL).

In our work, learning is seen as a process of promoting relational autonomy (Smith,1997; Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000), which implies that students get involved collectively and not only individually into learning situations. The collective dimension of the teaching and learning process represents the core condition for students to acquire the knowledge involved in the cultural domains we study (mathematics, PE and ESL) and develop emancipating stances.

The objectives of this symposium is two-fold. First we seek to put to the test our reciprocal interpretations and uses of some of JATD tools: how do school subject contents specify the modelling of joint action? How is the theory interpreted when used to analyse various practices in different educational systems (Scotland, Germany and France)? To what extent do empirical observations, according to different subject contents and social educational systems, allow us to raise new questions about the theoretical model? Secondly, this comparative work also allows us to explore under what conditions seeing what happens in class as a joint action allows us to change the common way of perceiving teaching practices and to decipher the emancipating characteristics of educational practices.

During the symposium session, we will first present the general features of this framework focusing on the notions that each of us uses (e.g., didactic game, didactic contract, didactic milieu, etc.). In the second part of our presentation, we will present empirical analyses so as to give concrete expression to the chosen theoretical notions. In the third part, we will discuss some initial outcomes of our analyses. In the last part of the symposium, we will re-examine some key-points of the joint action theory, in order to refine our common background in didactic research.