Do teachers make all their students play the same learning games? A comparative study of learning games in Biology and English in primary and lower secondary education

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 is to examine, through the study of two different school subjects: biology and English as a second language, how passive didactic differentiation (Sensevy et al. 2008) 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 (Sensevy and Mercier 2007; Sensevy 2011). 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 (Morrow 2007).