Study Days – 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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General overview

In relation to issues of teaching, learning, development, and training, certain empirical and technological research projects focus their investigations on work in a variety of professional settings, such as teaching, healthcare, agriculture, social work, law, etc. They strive to understand objects that are systematically integrated into particularly complex situations. This encourages researchers to develop and invent new theories and methodologies.

Among these, we should note the establishment of a research program which, from the outset, was based on a transdisciplinary approach aimed at strengthening the heuristic potential of the "isolates" that most often constitute the humanities and social sciences, and which has come to: (a) targeting multi-level investigations of human activity, and (b) envisaging virtuous collaborations between research programs that are partly similar, partly complementary, partly alternative, and related to technology (Theureau, 2015).

In relation to the question of effectively strengthening their heuristic potential, but also their scientific acceptability, these innovations raise a number of epistemological and methodological issues. Among others:

* the sufficiently integrative nature of the ontological assumptions of the research program developed. In other words, their effective capacity to enable, for the better, the articulation of disciplines;
* the dynamics of appropriation that these hypotheses imply, as well as the "shifts" among researchers that they contribute to bringing about;
* the one that can be associated with ways of conceiving the relationship between levels of research: a juxtaposition versus a dynamic "star pair" relationship (i.e., following a "co-production in dependency");
* the dynamics that can be associated with ways of conceiving human facts: as things versus activities;
* that of the acceptability and/or complementarity of data construction and analysis methods; within the same research program or between research programs (which wish to work on the same object or interrelated objects);
* that which can be associated with ways of conceiving the types of relationships between empirical and technological research: juxtaposition versus organic relationships, and the application of science to technology versus organic relationships;
* that which can be associated with the relationships between empirical + technological research and philosophical research.

In his 2015 book, entitled "Le cours d'action : l'enaction et l'expérience" (The Course of Action: Enaction and Experience), Jacques Theureau helps to clarify the issues at stake and develops proposals that could enable progress to be made. He does so at the heart of, and beyond, a specific research program aimed at describing, understanding, and explaining human activity. This research program is known as "course of action." He is one of its founding fathers and has remained one of its most active researchers since the 1970s. His reflections, alongside the clarification and enrichment of a series of criteria aimed at seriously considering what a research program is, lead to (and inspire) bold proposals for scientific interactions.

During these days, based on conferences and presentations of empirical work, we will discuss these proposals. They will provide an opportunity to clarify existing problems and, we hope, to make progress in resolving them. The discussions may also give rise to new questions that will fuel the potential fruitfulness of each other's research activities.