Conference Agenda

While teaching and learning are often conceived teleologically – as well-planned processes aimed at realising predetermined outcomes and curricular objectives – the realities of educational practice are far less predictable or controllable. Empirical research has documented how teachers and students frequently encounter unforeseen – if not unforeseeable – situations. Examples are, for instance, spontaneous moral reactions of students in response to what they encounter during educational activities (Öhman & Östman 2008), resistance to the teaching content (Urberg 2025), unexpected poignant experiences of epiphany or wonder (Östman et al. 2024), controversies emerging in the classroom (Cassar et al. 2021), strong emotional responses (Sheppard & Levy 2019), disturbing existential experiences (Vandenplas et al. 2023), etc. Such unexpected event can be challenging to handle as a teacher. Yet, they also hold valuable educative potential. They can elicit what Garrison (2010) calls ‘teachable moments’. Those moments occur in the classroom “when teachers and students engage in meaningful inquiry regarding some problematic situation involving themselves and the subject matter being taught” (Garrison 2010: xv). Didactical research has shown that non-teleological teachable moments can, for instance, trigger a strong intrinsic motivation to learn; they can be subjectivating by appealing to the participants as persons and not merely as students compliantly fulfilling tasks; they can give rise to collective inquiry into shared matters of concern; and they can stimulate creativity (Östman et al. 2024).

In this paper, we shed light on theories and analytical models that enable us to progress our understanding of how non-teleological teachable moments occur and unfold, and how teachers’ didactical work can optimise the opportunities to realise the educative potential they bring about. Theoretically, we explore connections between American pragmatism, German didactics, and theories of embodied cognition. Analytically, we draw on the models ‘Trajectory of Learning Processes’ and ‘Dramaturgy of Teaching Practices’.

John Dewey’s pragmatist understanding of how education comes about through experience (Dewey, 1938/2015) offers us a fruitful theoretical lens for understanding how unforeseen experiences, such as the ones described above, can trigger valuable teachable moments. For Dewey (1916/1997), the educative value of experience lies in ensuring growth – not as a fixed goal that is reached once predetermined outcomes are met, but as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience. For Dewey, growth is the end of education, it does not have an end (Stitzlein 2017). As further explained below in the model on the Trajectory of Learning Processes, Dewey understands growth as habit (trans)formation through transactions of individuals and their environments. Cultivating habits is, for Dewey (1916/1997), a process that involves plasticity. It results in an expanded repertoire of actions – new ways of feeling, thinking, noticing, and acting – that enables individuals to coordinate their activities and environments in more specific, complex, and purposeful ways (Östman & Öhman 2023) and stimulates further growth. As such, Dewey’s educational philosophy and the models outlined in the next section align well with the German didactical tradition of Bildung through the interplay between self and world (English 2017, Benner 2017). From this perspective, unforeseeable events can be understood as potential strong triggers and drivers for Bildung as social self-cultivation (Garrison et al. 2025). Complementary to pragmatist educational theory and Bildung, recent research on embodied cognition can help us to progress insight into how surprising encounters and situations influence learning processes by shedding light on how cognitive processes are inseparable from emotion and bodily states (Damasio 2018, Johnson & Schulkin 2023). As Johnson & Schulkin (2023) explain, pragmatism is inherently an embodied theory of mind, and modern cognitive science provides the empirical grounding Dewey could, in his time, only anticipate.

Objectives and Background

Research on uncertainty in teachers’ professional practice has often focused on identifying contradictory demands generated by pedagogical ideals and the organizational conditions of schooling in contemporary societies. As such, much is known about the conditions of teaching, but it has been less investigated how teachers navigate the complex constellation of educational goals, societal functions and institutional constraints of pedagogical practice. This contribution conceptualizes teachers as capable actors, which are able to perceive and weigh conflicting situationally appropriate modes of action embedded within their educational environment, while not being omniscient and thus in need of orientation (Diaz-Bone, 2011). It adds a new perspective to teachers’ professional action research, inquiring how teachers engage with and make sense of organizational and social uncertainty in upper secondary education when preparing and reflecting on lessons. It does so by drawing on eight completed artefact-supported episodic interviews and will be further developed in an ongoing dissertation project. Investigating teachers’ search for orientation sheds light on tensions between establishing relieving routines in uncertain situations of action and remaining aware of what their teaching cannot achieve. In navigating situations of conflicting expectations, which cannot be fully reconciled in their everyday decisions, teachers seem to reduce this complexity by looking towards exams as key reference points when approaching teaching situations.

The tension between educational ideals and certification-oriented schooling are increasingly characteristic of educational systems across different countries and lead to increasingly unequal outcomes for their students (Hadjar & Becker, 2016; Skarpenes & Hidle, 2024). Being especially prevalent in upper secondary education, teachers are then expected to support students’ individual learning and development while simultaneously preparing them for standardized assessments that structure educational trajectories and life chances (Stronati, 2023). The current strengthening of governing education by standardization then leaves little room for teachers to autonomously shape student-oriented trajectories (Bergh & Wahlström, 2018). Although teachers are widely acknowledged to educate under these uncertain conditions, there is little empirical research that allows teachers themselves to articulate how they experience and make sense of these tensions in practice (Horvath, 2018). As such, while empirically situated within the German educational system, the project addresses aspects of teaching that extend beyond a national context. Uncertainty in teaching, standardized assessments, and the tension between educational ideals and certification-oriented schooling are associated with educational systems across countries.

Theoretical Perspective

The study draws on French pragmatic sociology (Diaz-Bone, 2023; Imdorf & Leemann, 2023) to analyze how a plurality of appropriate modes of action in teaching stabilize around shared ideas of what constitutes legitimate educational goals. It allows for an analytical shift toward a focus on specific situations in which actors navigate conditions of uncertainty. Teachers are understood as endowed with practical judgment, able to discern and balance competing situationally appropriate modes of action within their educational environments yet constrained by a limited rationality and thus in need of orientation (Diaz-Bone, 2011). Depending on the situational arrangements of material and immaterial elements – like room arrangements, standards or structural obligations – they move between different appropriate engagements such as functional planning of lessons or caring relationships to their students. Teaching is then a continuous coordination effort impacting which of the education system’s contradictory demands are eventually realized (Thévenot, 2019). Teachers’ professional capability, thus, lies not in resolving this uncertainty, which would be impossible, but in dealing with it in ways that allow them to continue acting. The study shifts the focus from evaluating whether teachers act “appropriately” toward understanding how they make sense of and engage with the conditions under which they teach as well as finding the elements in a situation which enable meaningful orientation.

This communication proposes a comparative analysis of two case studies from two different educational contexts in France. It investigates the phenomenon of invisible knowledge, content that is rarely present or even absent from national curricula but present in classroom practices. The aim is to examine the gap between the official objects defining school disciplines and the objects identified through didactic research.

Within the framework of comparative didactics, the main challenge lies in articulating the "epistemological program" and the "didactic program" (Schubauer-Leoni & al., 2007) to reveal the conditions of knowledge transmission and appropriation. Two types of knowledge are examined here: emotional knowledge and gender-based knowledge. By comparing the reference epistemology of these knowledges with their effectiveness in ordinary teaching-learning practices, this presentation aims to highlight the specificities (what is specific in a particular context) and genericities (what is common for both contexts) regards to this knowledge (Ligozat, 2025).

On an epistemological level, a paradoxical convergence emerges although these two types of knowledge are difficult to identify in official texts, they occupy a concrete place in classroom practices. We propose to categorize them as "un-ascertained knowledge" to refer to ascertained knowledge (Kelly, 2014) and investigate their manifestations and construction in two different settings: a violin lesson in a music school and a French lesson in a middle school.

In the first context, the national pedagogical orientation scheme for music (Ministère de la Culture, 2023) makes no mention of "feeling", "emotion", "affect", or "mood." However, according to professional literature, performers sometimes talk at length about the importance of emotions in the lessons they received from their teachers and in their careers (Menuhin, 1977). Furthermore, scientific literature identifies emotions both as a "means" and an "object of teaching" (Rickenmann & al., 2009). Finally, concepts such as "emotional competence" in psychology and "emotional work" in sociology highlight the fine entanglements between theories of action and emotion.

In the second context, recent reports emphasize the school's fundamental role in transmitting a culture of equality (Haut Conseil à l'Egalité, 2026). This involves teaching specific content dedicated to gender equality rather than just ensuring equal treatment. However, curricular prescriptions remain vague. For instance, in French lessons, gender equality is not an explicit object of study but is approached indirectly through the analysis of society in specific historical periods (Ministère de l'Education nationale, 2024). Nevertheless, in situ observations reveal a broader reality: french proves to be a discipline where knowledge related to gender is effectively transmitted (Dias-Chiaruttini, 2018), particularly through the analysis of literary texts.

The research questions are as follows : In terms of didactic interactions, how this un-ascertained knowledge is taught and construct? Which are genericities and specificities of these knowledge content in the two case studies ?

One hypothesis is that un-ascertained knowledge, gender-based knowledge in French and emotional knowledge in music, does indeed exist and is co-constructed during ordinary teaching-learning processes. Knowledge is understood as the power to act upon one's environment. This hypothesis justifies an "bottom-up analysis" (analyse ascendante, in French) of didactic transposition: starting from effective practices to move toward the knowledge to be taught. Using Johsua’s (1998) classification of learning modes (silent learning versus formal study objects), this comparative study employs the Joint Action in Didactics (JAD) (Ligozat, 2025) as a theoretical tool. The concept of the "milieu" (Amade-Escot & Venturini, 2015) is mobilized to analyse the material, symbolic and social objects attesting to the presence of knowledge.