Abstract
This empirical work focuses on teachers’ chronogenetic decisions at lower secondary school from socio-cultural approach. The context of observation is about a teacher teaching simultaneously two fifth grade classroom. We infer decision making from observations of classroom situations. We consider that a decision is made up of three components: the reasons of the decisions, its indicators and its resulting action. The procedure was to cut both teaching sequences into units of meaning (episodes). On this base we constructed a methodological tool enabling us, on the one hand, to link the microscopic scale of taught knowledge (order of seconds) with the mesoscopic scale (order of minutes) and macroscopic scale (order of hours) rebuilding, thus, the discourse consistency on the taught knowledge; on the other hand, to study the effect that transition from one classroom to another have on the restructuration of the teacher discourse (retro-interactive decisions). Our analysis produced a typology of chronogenetic decisions: the temporal decisions (to linger, to progress) and the articulation of taught knowledge decisions (to call, to announce, to advance, to remind, to resume, to postpone). It also enabled us to follow the progression of the knowledge negotiation during the sequence and to introduce the concepts of a didactic intention and a decision’s story. We were able to highlight the similarities and differences between classroom practices. Finally, by the exhaustive cutting of the sequence into episodes, and the expert implementation of our methodology on Transana, we defined a model of discourse analysis in science education research.
Keywords: sciences education, teaching practices, theory of action, scales analysis, discursive analysis, taught knowledge, episodes, chronogenetic decisions, retro-interactive decisions, video analysis, Transana®
Thesis full reference
Badreddine, Z. (2009). Study of teachers’ chronogenetic decisions in physics teaching at lower secondary school; a case study in Lebanon. Doctoral dissertation in Educational Sciences. University Lumière-Lyon 2 : Lyon.
Correspondence
Zeynab Badreddine
ENS-LSH
UMR ICAR
15, Parvis René Descartes
BP 7000
69342 LYON cedex 07
E-mail: zeynab_badreddine@yahoo.fr
