Do teachers make all their students play the same learning games? A comparative study of learning games in biology and English as a second language

Abstract

This article, based upon the field of comparative didactics, seeks to contribute to the identification of generic and specific features in the teaching and learning process. More particularly, its aim was to examine, through the study of two different school subjects: biology and English as a second language, how passive didactic differentiation can develop and account for the gap in progress growing between more-able and less-able students. For our analysis, we adopt a didactic viewpoint basing our study on what is going on in the class when the teacher and her students interact and use notions borrowed from the Joint Action Theory in Didactics. At the end of the article, we mainly argue that more teacher training focused on ‘objects of learning’ and ‘knowledge-in-use’ is necessary if we want teachers to be able to produce didactic milieus adapted to students with mixed abilities and, more generally, if we want to increase epistemic access.

Keywords:

• theories of teaching
• teacher professionalism
• comparative didactics
• passive didactic differentiation
• didactic contract
• didactic milieu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As Nolan explains (2012, p. 349) in reference to Grenfell’s work (2008), ‘cultural capital is a synonym for status (or position) and refers to the resources that one brings to (and/or has access to in) the field’. When discussed in the context of education, cultural capital can include one’s level of education, classroom experiences and subject knowledge.

2. In our work, the word ‘didactic/s’ is used in its French meaning. This means, following Chevallard’s work (1999, 2007), that we focus on the anthropological and action-based dimension of the teaching and learning process and insist on the necessity to associate the analysis of knowledge-in-use with the study of institutional practices, in which the pieces of knowledge are created, developed, used, spread, taught and learnt.

3. The concept of didactic time (Brousseau, 1997) allows to study how teaching and learning operate over time, and more specifically, the way the teacher accelerates time when he decides to introduce a new object in the didactic milieu or, on the contrary decides to slow down the didactic time in order to deal with didactic heterogeneities (Chopin, 2011).

4. ‘The language uses, closely related to the epistemology of the subjects cannot, in our opinion, be taught/learnt outside the context of the activity itself’. (Jaubert & Rebière, 2001).

5. For more information about the way, the notion of games is used to describe teaching and learning situations, see Gruson, Forest, and Loquet, (2012).

6. The synopsis provides a synoptic view of the lesson and makes visible relationships one could not perceive if one looked at the lesson only in a chronological order.

7. In the French curriculum, one can read that ‘research activities, processing and transferring information activities (surveys, interviews, investigations) or role plays can guide a rich and stimulating exchange and implement effective communication in the classroom. Students can then reuse words and structures to express themselves and communicate on their own behalf thanks to pair- or group-work that can greatly increase students’ speaking time’ (MEN, 2002b, p. 37). However, organising pair- or group-work is not enough. To obtain affective communication and foster students’ oral production, teachers have to design situations including challenging information gaps as Morrow explains: ‘In real life, communication takes place between two (or more) people, one of whom knows something that is unknown to the other(s). The purpose of the communication is to bridge this information gap. […] In classroom terms, an information gap exercise means that one of the student must be in a position to tell another something that the second student does not already know. If two students are looking at a picture of a street scene and one says to the other, ‘Where is the dog?’ when he knows that the dog is sitting outside the post-office because he can see it as clearly as his fellow-student can then this is not communicative. There is no information-gap. But if one student has the picture of the street scene and the other has a similar picture with some features missing, which he must find out from the first student, then the same question becomes real, meaningful – and communicative. This concept of information gap seems to be one of the most fundamental in the whole area of communicative teaching’ (Morrow, 1992, p. 62).

8. In the diagram, LG stands for learning games and the dotted lines show on what specific games the main LG relied.

9. For a more thorough analysis of this situation in relation with the notions of didactic contract and milieu, see Gruson (2009).

10. The concept of didactic blindness (Roiné, 2009) refers to teachers’ behaviours. This phenomenon appears when teachers pass by the didactic conditions that would allow teaching and learning situations to be efficient. This ‘blindness’ is one of the consequences of the impact, on teachers’ representations, of mentalism ideology, i.e. concentration on individuals, mental perception and thought processes at the expense of an analysis of content knowledge for teaching.

11. In the original quotation, Nolan (2012) uses the auxiliary verb ‘might’ that we have deliberately changed into ‘should’.