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

Tramway stop: Philippides stadium, line 1

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General presentation

In connection with teaching, learning-development and training issues, certain empirical and technological research projects focus their investigations on work - in many areas of professional interaction, such as teaching, health care, agriculture, social work, law and so on. They focus on understanding objects that are systematically integrated into particularly complex situations. This calls on researchers to make the necessary theoretical and methodological inventions and enrichments.

These include the development of a research program which, from the outset based on a trans-disciplinary rationale of enhancing the heuristic potential of the "isolates" most often constituted by the humanities and social sciences, has come to : (a) aim for multi-level investigations of human activity, and (b) envisage virtuous collaborations between research programs that are partly similar, partly complementary, partly alternative, and in relation to technology (Theureau, 2015).

These innovations raise a number of epistemological and methodological issues, not least the question of how to effectively enhance their heuristic potential and ensure their scientific acceptability. These include :

* whether the ontological hypotheses of the research program are sufficiently integrative. In other words, their capacity to articulate disciplines for the better;
* the dynamics of appropriation they imply, and the "displacement" of researchers to whose emergence they contribute;
* that which may be associated with ways of conceiving the relationship between levels of research: a juxtaposition relationship versus a dynamic "star-pair" relationship (i.e., following a "dependent co-production");
* that which may be associated with ways of conceiving human facts: as things versus activities;
* that of the admissibility and/or complementarity of data construction and analysis methods; within the same research program or between research programs (that wish to work on the same object or on overlapping objects);
* that which may be associated with ways of conceiving the types of relationship between empirical and technological research: juxtaposition-type versus organic relationship and application-of-science-to-technology versus organic relationship;
* that which can be associated with the relationship between empirical + technological research and philosophical research.

In his 2015 book "Le cours d'action: l'enaction et l'expérience", Jacques Theureau takes part in clarifying the problems at hand, and develops proposals that could enable us to move forward. He does so at the heart of, and beyond, a specific research program aimed at the description-comprehension-explanation of human activity. This research program is known as the "course of action". He was one of its founding fathers, and has remained one of its most active researchers since the 1970s. As well as clarifying and enriching a series of criteria for the serious consideration of what constitutes a research program, his reflections have led to (and inspired) bold proposals for scientific interaction.

These proposals will be discussed at the conference, which will also include papers presenting empirical work. They will provide an opportunity to clarify existing problems and, we hope, make progress in resolving them. Our discussions will also be an opportunity to raise new questions, which in turn will enhance the potential fruitfulness of each other's research activities.