complex objects, target objects, shared attention objects, real objects, inducing objects, material objects, linguistic objects, semiotic objects, symbolic objects, didactic interface objects between teachers and pupils, cultural objects, original objects and so on.
In this list, it is important to differentiate between state or status designations and functional designations.
Concrete objects, whether technical, complex, real, material, manipulable, tangible, linguistic, semiotic, symbolic, cultural, etc., are thus qualified with the major oppositions between simple and compound (or complicated or complex), between actual and virtual, between real and symbolic, without their functions being specified. They are differentiated according to what they are, covering the material culture to which they belong. These are the school objects.
Conversely, transitional objects, mediators, inducers, interfaces, catalysts, etc., belong to a category distinguished by their function in the school environment. They are then didactic objects or pedagogical objects. They are at the service of teaching–learning as content resources or material for teachers and pupils. They are then schoolified and consequently desocialized, pretexts or accessories for school work.
By way of example, the train and its wagons made in kindergarten are the medium for learning to read diagrammatic instruction leaflets observing the order of the informational steps. This train then loses its customary function of transporting people or goods. In an even more distanced way, the train and its wagons represented by images become labels making it possible to identify the time and the days of the week. These translations are then sources of potential misunderstandings for the pupils who must notice this change of reference and mobilize the cognitive posture called for, sometimes implicitly.
Some articles in this book substitute artifacts or instruments for objects in order to extend the material world to symbolic or virtual things and in order to characterize a more anthropocentric approach highlighting the subjective appropriation of these things. In this regard, it is worth reiterating the contributions of Rabardel (1995) who first differentiated “technical objects” and “manufactured material objects” and then used the concept of “artifacts” by making reference to the definition in English. “The concept of the artifact refers in anthropology to anything that has undergone a transformation, even minimal, of human origin” (p. 59). With this anthropocentric perspective (as opposed to a technocentric vision), Rabardel characterizes the process of instrumental genesis. An instrument is thus both an artifact and the patterns associated with it:
In most conceptualizations it is the artifact that is considered explicitly or implicitly as an instrument. We propose to broaden this point of view and to consider the instrument as a mixed entity which is closely lined to both the subject and the artifact. In this perspective, the instrument includes: a material or symbolic artifact produced by the user or by others; one or more associated patterns of use resulting from a particular construction or the appropriation of pre-existing social patterns […] The combination of artifact and patterns constitutes the instrument. (Rabardel 1995, p. 11)
It is from this instrumental perspective that the objects for learning and the objects to learn about should be investigated.
I.2.2. Objects, artifacts, instruments and viewpoints
The real problem of the investigation of objects in school activities is indeed that of the point of view cast upon these objects. In this regard, we should come back to Haudricourt’s suggestion which claims technology as a human science and not just an applied science:
What characterizes a science is the point of view, not the object. For example, here is a table. It can be studied from a mathematical point of view, it has a surface, a volume; from the physical point of view, we can study its weight, density, resistance to pressure; from the chemical point of view, its potential for combustion by fire or dissolution by acids; from a biological point of view, the age and species of tree which provided the wood; finally from the human sciences point of view, the origin and the function of the table for people. (Haudricourt 1987, p. 37)
From this perspective, it is therefore necessary to investigate from a didactic and/or pedagogical point of view the artifacts introduced into lessons.
I.2.3. Artifacts, content and modalities
The challenge here is to put forward and suggest questions. The central questions are concerned with the function of these artifacts: what are the relationships between the artifacts and the taught content or teaching processes? What too are the relationships between artifacts and school subjects or disciplines? Develay (1992) indicates that a school discipline is characterized by its attributes, which are composed of knowledge (declarative and procedural), tasks and objects, and whose overall coherence is fixed by the “disciplinary matrix”, which is the principle of intelligibility of the discipline and can evolve in line with teaching progressivity. Thus, life sciences based on natural history are taught through observation, flowers, rocks or animals, and knowledge of functions, but this is not the case in molecular biology.
For the pupils, tasks, knowledge and more particularly objects are then criteria for indexing school moments, which is indicated by research focused on disciplinary awareness (Reuter 2007) or curricular consciousness (Lebeaume 2000, 2017). As has been emphasized above, misunderstandings (Bautier and Rayou 2013) are sources of construction of inequalities because some pupils, for example, confuse the task of coloring in different teeth with the objective of making the distinction between incisors that cut, canines that tear and molars that grind with the task of coloring in drawings and keeping within the outlines of the shapes drawn.
I.2.4. Artifacts, purposes and references
The first diagram (Figure I.1) helps to clarify the functions of the artifacts introduced into school activities. It questions, on the one hand, the orientation of tasks and artifacts in relation to the intentions and targets of education or teaching and, on the other hand, their meaning in relation to references. Through the relationship between purposes and references, it ultimately interrogates the overall consistency of teaching–learning situations and school activities.
Figure I.1. Diagram for analyzing the consistency between artifacts, purposes and references
An example of the need to check consistency relates to the activities involved in carrying out manual or technological work when the object that one is learning how to make (a wooden box for example) becomes an object to learn geometry. The same applies when studying the pedal mechanism of a bicycle and identifying the number of turns of the wheel according to the gear ratio becomes an exercise in proportionality. The bicycle, usually upside down on a table, thus loses its function of use. At the same time, the understanding of this technical solution escapes the pupils. Another example involves the geographical map which, according to Thémines (2004), can cover four didactic-pedagogical ideal types8 that bring contrasting conceptions of the space designed and represented.
I.2.5. Contributory or constitutive content and curriculum form
By extension, we should characterize objects or artifacts in the curricular form distinguished by the two dimensions indicated by Forquin (2008): systemic and sequential. In other words, it is about investigating the synchronic and diachronic developments of teaching–learning and the functions of the objects and artifacts which are associated (Lebeaume 2019b). In technological education, technical objects or systems thus have a constitutive function for the content taught. Historically, however, in this area of teaching, these objects are sometimes viewed as having a contributory function, that is to say that they are vehicle(s)