Contenu du sommaire : Aller sur le terrain

Used in research as well as in socio-professional practices, the « field » designates much more than it seems. The attention paid to the most common conceptions (place of investigation and/or action, research object, pragmatic positioning) leads to the identification of risks (naturalization, reification) and consequences (homogenization, standardization) in order to highlight underlying aspects, most often unquestioned because they are unconscious or implicit. This problematisation of a term that appears to be self-evident, even though it is a social construct to be decoded (or deconstructed), ultimately leads to the study of more complex and fruitful aspects (experience, practice, relationship, work) that only a critical and ethical reflexivity allows to adjust individually and collectively, giving this process (epistemic, emotional, instrumental, social) a fundamental function of education and training.

This exchange is the result of a meeting with François Laplantine, honorary professor at Lumière-Lyon 2 University where he founded the anthropology department. His research, conducted in Africa, Brazil, and more recently in Japan, questions the ways and methods of producing knowledge about humans. By resorting to anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis or artistic experimentation, the author invites us to think about the question of the body, the sensitive, the intimate, and the presence of the researcher in what he calls « field experience ».

In education, as in many other fields, quantitative indicators hold the upper hand. The register of legitimate proof is essentially based on statistics, surveys, rates, quantified and aggregated data. However, many decisive elements for understanding the processes at work remain inaccessible by these processes. Gathering the point of view of the actors concerned, observing their interactions, analyzing the routines or deciphering the tensions, all this implies the use of qualitative methods. The qualitative inquiry implies that the researcher produces his own data thanks to his personal immersion in one or more sites, as close as possible to everyday life, at the heart of the local contexts in which educational policies take place, and where they are subject to reactions, adaptations and workarounds of the actors.

After recalling the theoretical reversal made by ethnomethodology and the frequent misinterpre tations associated with it, this article develops some of the features of ethnomethodology, as a sociology of practical achievements, which seeks to investigate the practice of ordinary social actors who constantly apply their social skills through their « practical sociological reasoning ». This competence is not restricted to a few, such as sociologists for example, but is practiced by all human beings in their daily exchanges. In accordance to certain concepts of ethnomethodology, the article develops three elementary operations that any researcher in the fields of health or education, and more generally in the social and human sciences, can easily carry out : observation, listening, and description.

To implement the usual methodological means of the social sciences on an object as singular as the dream would be to reverse the order of priorities, which requires starting from a theoretical framework to go towards a methodology, and almost completely destroy the specificity of its object. It is from the experience of a methodological invention responding to the needs of a general theory of dreamlike expression that we will be talking about here. The article aims to clarify the conditions under which dreams are collected, the nature of the multiple interviews carried out with dreamers, the type of relationship that is established between the investigator and the respondent, and the work of sociological interpretation of dreams at the intersection of two types of ignorance and knowledge (in the investigator and in the respondent).

The intelligibility of human activities and the forms of learning that underlie them is less to be sought in the detachment of exceptional moments than in discrete occurrences or phenomena of small scale. This article studies the situations and processes that contribute to the silent and ordinary construction of the subject's experience. It is a question of looking at the details of the experience by paying attention to the role of the insignificant, the neglected and the lesser-than-meaning. A case study in an hospital provides an opportunity to study how the smallest moments of the activity are decisive in the conduct of the action. An experiment conducted with a group of teachers also makes it possible to consider the extent to which training can be considered as a privileged space for putting the neglected back at the center of attention. It is thus possible to establish a perspective of both research and intervention in which the almost-rights of experience are better identified, conceptualized and operationalized as such.

This article proposes, from a retrospective reflection on several investigations, to take as an object of study the activity of the researcher in the context of interactions with other actors in the field and to examine the effects of these encounters on the construction of materials and more broadly on the research field. It is a question here of considering scientific inquiry in an ecological way as a participant in the modification of the properties of a research, work or training environment by a set of joint influences producing a situation, more or less, favourable to the development of the actors (respondents and researcher) and to scientific production.

This article outlines and discusses issues and practices for effective field research in workplaces. Workplaces imperatives are usually associated with the production of goods or provision of services. Consequently, research activity usually needs to fit in and around them. So, there are considerations associated with researching in workplaces that can lead to effective investigative practices. These include engaging with workplaces, securing permission to conduct research and access workplace sites ; researchers being flexible and responsive to the imperatives of workplaces, informants' availability and time consciousness. Also, there are considerations for securing engagement to activities during work-related activities, being able to access and utilise authentic work experiences and sustaining effective relationships with workplaces. The author proposes a set of suggestions and practices identified through conducting research in workplaces of different kinds.

This article proposes to state and clarify a certain number of principles often forgotten or passed over in silence to go into the field with a view to research or intervention to respond to training issues. It thus addresses « small » problems such as the desire and fear of going into the field, more essential questions like : « what is the field ? » because with each search or each site, the terrain always remains to be determined. It also proposes to distance itself from theoretical or methodological dogmas while maintaining its frameworks and pushing its methods to the limit. It is based on a large number of anecdotes or elements of the author's experiences « with the field ».

This contribution aims to recall the decisive role of field work for research in vocational education and training and the hybrid and dynamic nature of such experiences. By looking back on fifteen years of empirical research on verbal interactions in initial and continuing vocational training, the article highlights the multiple and fluctuating configurations through which the relationships between researchers and practitioners encountered in the field may evolve.

Observing work : the way in which it is done is linked to the intentions of the person approaching it (to analyze it, to control it, to evaluate it, to organize it, to film it…). In an ergological approach, the researcher tries to find the point of view of the person at work, with his debates about norms. It is then a question of deepening the positioning of the subject in relation to the object, by confronting the limits of an external view. The modalities of the exercise and the place of each person are then to be rethought.

Geography is a territorial science that relies on the practice of fieldwork : the geographer reports what is observed in each place and contextualizes it to transform the punctual observable into an overall analysis. He quantifies the field to objectify and compare. He goes back into the past to propose a prospective. He goes through the socio-spatial categories to characterize them and put them in relation. This paper illustrates this perspective through a case study involving epistemologies of education and training sciences and a geographical field practice. It aims to show how multidisciplinarity allows for a fruitful conceptual interaction. Also it shows how, starting from socio-professional issues in education and training, a field of study can be re-explored. It is then possible to consider changing scales and view of investigation to analyse situations.

This contribution deals with a methodological issue about documenting and analyzing body-dominant activity tracks thanks to materials gotten from a field work about psychomotor therapy. Body micro-adjustements which are realized by the subjects are discreet and imply to use a tool that allows to exagerate the shapes in order to label blockages faced by the subject as well as attitudes and postures that characterize the activity sequence.

Some experiences are built in private, protected spaces, which constitute privileged fields for approaching the development of the subject in its least visible and least known aspects. The entry into parenthood is one of these emblematic stages where the adult subject is confronted with fundamental learning in a transformative turning point in life. The intelligibility of experiential processes, in particular when uncomfortable situations arise where emotions come together (doubt, anxiety, fear, etc.), depends on the researcher's ability to approach them in their most intimate dimensions and on his ability to get caught up in the specificity of the terrain he explores.

This contribution aims to document the preparatory acts for the care intervention carried out by the nurse in an emergency situation. Particular attention has been paid to one of the emblematic gestures which consists of the preparation of a kidney dish containing the infusion kit, prior to the patient's care. The first materials collected and the analysis that was made of them made it possible to report a different function of this gesture, as well as a disparity between novice and expert nurses in the management of the unexpected.

Explaining the behaviour of interacting humans requires meeting our fellow human beings and interfering with them to understand what drives them to do what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. The context of educational intervention in the field of sports practices, which is more particularly discussed here, makes it possible to grasp the issue of a necessary clarification. Distinguishing between the sports field (the pitch) and the research field leads to consider a third kind of field. That of the model that allows virtual manipulation and thus the anticipation of behaviour. The example of the serve/receive module in volleyball turns out that it is possible to influence the output of the model by playing on the variables that can be controlled at the input of the model. What has been « injected » into the system makes it possible to obtain the variation of the results obtained. This, it seems, is a promising way to order what at first glance seems to be chaos.