This symposium brings together researchers from three countries, France, Germany and the UK, and seeks to strengthen cooperation on issues of teaching, learning and interpretative quality. However, current research in didactics in the three countries and across Europe demonstrates great diversity, parallel to diversity of instructional practices, initial teacher education and didactic theory construction. The objective of this symposium is to show how researchers work together in order to create a common theoretical background and to overcome the fragmentation of research (cp. Hudson and Meyer, 2011). We use the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD) (Sensevy and Mercier, 2007; Sensevy, 2011a, 2011b, 2012; Gruson, Forest & Loquet, 2012) as a point of reference for empirical research and start with the so-called didactic triangle composed of three poles or systems, teaching, learning and the knowledge at stake (French “savoir”). Diversity of instructional settings in the three countries will, as we hope, show the power and the weaknesses of theory construction as we follow John Dewey’s pragmatic didactic theory. He writes in Democracy and Education that “things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint action”. We assume that in the classroom setting this leads to negotiation of meaning and needs a semiosis theory of teaching and learning. We therefore also depend on an elaborated understanding of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language game-form of life unity and on his concept of seeing something as .., i.e., for example, seeing instruction as joint action. We want to do the theoretical work with the help of a broad setting of empirical data: normal classroom instruction and bilingual physical education, primary and secondary stage instruction, mathematics and foreign languages, students and teachers. We will show how each contributor uses constructions drawn from JATD or compared with JATD in order to better understand the actions and sense constructions of teachers and students.

Taking examples from our three studies, we will test the didactic theory via our reciprocal interpretations and uses of JATD tools: How does subject content specify the modeling of joint action? How is the theory interpreted when used to analyse various practices in different educational systems? To what extent do our empirical observations allow us to raise new questions about the theoretical model?

Our program for the two parts of the symposium is as follows: Firstly we will present the joint action framework as indicated above, focusing on the notions of didactic contract and didactic milieu. Secondly, we will present our methodology for empirical analysis. In this part of the symposium, which will take most of the time and which will have a workshop character, we will practice concrete comparative interpretational work. In the final part of the symposium, two discussants will evaluate the work done. We will examine to what extent the empirical analyses, rooted in different educational systems, will allow us to speak of common ground in didactics. We hope that our studies will – in the long run - create tools for improved teacher education.