Workshop – Transdisciplinarity and Multi-Level Research

[gdlr_styled_box content_color="#34495e" background_color="#e0e0e0" corner_color="#c0c0c0"]Transdisciplinarity and Multi-Level Research in Education and Training: Theoretical and Methodological Issues[/fusion_content_box][/fusion_content_boxes]

June 27–28, 2018

Faculty of Education, Montpellier

Tram stop: Philippides Stadium, Line 1

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Overview

In connection with issues related to teaching, learning and development, or training, certain empirical and technological research studies focus their investigations on work—across a wide range of professional interaction settings such as education, healthcare, agriculture, social work, law, and so on. They seek to understand phenomena that are systematically embedded in particularly complex situations. This prompts researchers to engage in necessary theoretical and methodological refinements and innovations.

Among these initiatives, it is worth noting the establishment of a research program that, grounded from the outset in a transdisciplinary approach aimed at strengthening the heuristic potential of the “isolates” that the humanities and social sciences most often constitute, has come to: (a) focus on multi-level investigations of human activity, and (b) foster fruitful collaborations between research programs that are partly similar, partly complementary, partly alternative, and related to technology (Theureau, 2015).

In connection with the issue of effectively enhancing their heuristic potential—as well as their scientific validity—these innovations do raise a number of epistemological and methodological problems. Among others:

* whether the ontological assumptions of the research program developed are sufficiently integrative. In other words, whether they are effectively capable of facilitating, for the better, the articulation of disciplines;
* the dynamics of appropriation that these assumptions entail, as well as the “shifts” among researchers that they help bring about;
* the issue related to ways of conceiving the relationship between levels of research: a relationship of juxtaposition versus a dynamic “star pair” relationship (i.e., one based on “co-production in interdependence”);
* the issue related to ways of conceiving human phenomena: as things versus as activities;
* the issue of the acceptability and/or complementarity of methods for data construction and analysis; within a single research program or across research programs (that aim to study the same object or interrelated objects);
* the one that can be associated with ways of conceiving the types of relationships between empirical and technological research: a juxtapositional versus an organic relationship, and a relationship of applying science to technology versus an organic one;
* the issue related to the relationships between empirical and technological research and philosophical research.

In his 2015 book, titled *Le cours d’action : l’enaction et l’expérience*, Jacques Theureau helps clarify the issues at hand and develops proposals that could lead to progress. He does so within—and beyond—a specific research program aimed at describing, understanding, and explaining human activity. This research program is known as the “course of action.” Theureau is one of its founding fathers and has remained one of its most active researchers since the 1970s. His reflections—conducted in parallel with the clarification and enrichment of a set of criteria for seriously considering what constitutes a research program—lead to (and inspire) bold proposals for scientific collaboration.

During this event, through a combination of lectures and presentations of empirical research, we will discuss these proposals. These sessions will provide an opportunity to clarify existing issues and, we hope, to make progress toward resolving them. The discussion sessions may also bring new questions to light, further enriching the potential of everyone’s research activities.