Transposition Didactique
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pp 373–387
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(1987) Our common future. Oxford, Oxford
University Press
Transposition Didactique
Andree Tiberghien1 and Gérard Sensevy2
1
National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS),
Université Lyon, Lyon, France
2
School of Education, University of Western
Brittany, Rennes, France
The concept of transposition didactique (didactic
transposition) was first proposed by the French
mathematics educator, Chevallard, in the 1980s,
who first developed it in the context of mathe-
matics education. To discuss it, let us start with
a particular case. When the concept of force is
listed in an official curriculum or is taught in high
school, its meaning cannot be identical to the
meaning of the concept of force in the physics
community. From the perspective of didactic
transposition, this difference is unavoidable.
To understand this claim we need to study how
individuals or institutions understand and use an
item of knowledge or, to approach it from another
angle, the relationships that they construct with
this knowledge. These relationships constitute
the meaning of this knowledge constructed by
the individuals or institutions. For example, if
we take a group of engineers constructing
a bridge, a group of physicists taking part in the
construction of a space shuttle, a high school
physics teacher, and a group of students, their
ways of using the concept of force will not be
the same. As a matter of fact, due to the
different things that are at stake in the different
situations, these individuals or groups will use the
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concept of force differently. Since, according to
Chevallard (1989, 1991), the ways of using
the concept of force are different, the concept
necessarily has different meanings in each case,
even if these meanings are compatible and may
overlap.
When a country or a state develops a new
curriculum or new standards, an official institu-
tion, most often the Ministry of Education,
chooses groups of experts to design it.
The members of these groups may belong to the
institution itself or be nominated by it. Each
group is in charge of a part of the curriculum,
according to the disciplines taught in the country.
In experimental sciences, the process might
involve a single group or several groups
depending on which disciplines are taught. In
science, the curriculum is principally (perhaps
even totally) designed with reference to the
knowledge and practices of the scientific
community. Sometimes, for example, when
socio-scientific issues are included in the
curriculum, the group can also use social knowl-
edge and practices as references. The idea of
didactic transposition makes explicit that
there is an unavoidable difference/distance
between the reference knowledge and practices
and those involved in the curriculum or the
standards.
This theoretical point of view therefore leads
researchers to raise questions aiming to under-
stand better how the transformation occurs and
with what constraints. Two main steps of trans-
position are distinguished. The first step goes
from the reference knowledge or practices to the
curriculum. The second step focuses on the trans-
position from the curriculum to the classroom T
activity, which is mainly the responsibility of
the teacher and of designers working from the
official curriculum.
The Didactic Transposition from
Scientific Knowledge to Official
Curriculum or Standards
Institutions such as ministries of education are
generally responsible for the step of transposition
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from scientific knowledge to official curriculum
or standards. The products of this step are texts
that present the knowledge to be taught. Note that
here and in the following discussion, knowledge
is used with a broad meaning that includes prac-
tices and epistemological aspects. These texts are
usually structured according to the concepts, pro-
cesses, or more recently societal uses of
a discipline. This division into “objects of knowl-
edge to be taught” is necessary and is different
from those used in the scientific community. For
example, the official curriculum in England for
science at key stage 4 (14–16 years old, grades
10–11) (in its 2007 version) was divided into two
main parts:
• How science works, with subdivisions:
(1) data, evidence, theories, and explanations,
(2) practical and enquiry skills, (3) communi-
cation skills, and (4) applications and implica-
tions of science.
• Breadth of science, with subdivisions:
(1) organisms and health, (2) chemical and
material behavior, (3) energy, electricity,
and radiations, and (4) environment, earth,
and universe. These divisions correspond
more or less to the disciplines – life science,
chemistry, physics, and earth science.
This division is not used in the activity of the
scientific community. For example, in a
typical published article, the methods, processes,
and content are deeply related; similarly in
laboratory activity, the researchers’ practices
integrate these two components. In contrast, in
the curriculum, each part has autonomy;
a given object of knowledge to be taught is
developed for it in the text. Moreover, each
part is developed as elements whose
acquisition by the students has to be assessed.
This corresponds to general characteristics of
curricula or standards developed by
Chevallard (1991). They are public texts identi-
fying distinct objects of knowledge to be taught,
the acquisition of which should be assessed.
There are also three other characteristics: the
knowledge to be taught is de-syncretized and its
acquisition is sequential; it is depersonalized; and
the sequence of students’ acquisition of knowl-
edge is planned.
Transposition Didactique
De-syncretized knowledge: In the example of
the official curriculum of England, in the part
headed “How science works,” one of the items
is “how scientific data can be collected and
analysed.” Such an object of knowledge is not
isolated in the practices of the scientific commu-
nity; but, in the official curriculum, it is distin-
guished from other elements and becomes an
item in the text of the curriculum. In other
words, it is de-syncretized.
Depersonalized knowledge: The objects of
knowledge are presented as independent of
a person. This characteristic has been highlighted
by educational researchers who discuss the
role of history in science teaching. In the
example presented above for England, this
depersonalization is clearly done; the subheading
is not “how scientists work” but “how science
works.”
Planned knowledge: The teaching of the
objects of knowledge has to be planned. More-
over, at the level of a curriculum, this plan is
implicitly supposed to be also the students’ acqui-
sition plan. This planning is also unavoidable. For
example, the official curriculum is constructed at
different levels from grade 1 to 12 (or 13
depending on the country); there is a planning
according to the succession of grades. In addition,
for each year the curriculum may propose
a progression. The didactic transposition involves
planning the sequence of the objects of knowl-
edge; this planning can be more or less precise
from case to case.
The Didactic Transposition from Official
Curriculum or Standards to Teaching
Practices
This transposition is up to the teachers and to the
designers of teaching sequences or other teaching
resources to the extent that they refer to the offi-
cial curriculum. Of course teachers have many
constraints to respect, such as allocated duration
and school organization. However, this step of
the transposition is crucial for students’ out-
comes. Nowadays, as we have already men-
tioned, most curricula involve practices, both
Transposition Didactique
scientific ones and, in some cases such as socio-
scientific issues, societal ones. When practices
are involved, the curricula specify objects of
knowledge to be taught that include the type of
teaching situations; this is not the case when
science content knowledge is involved. In the
latter case, the way these objects are introduced
depends on the teaching strategies chosen by the
teachers. They could be introduced using various
strategies: traditional lecturing, problem solving
in small groups with experiments or simulations,
etc. In the case of practices as objects to be taught,
the curriculum, more or less explicitly, specifies
the types of teaching situations. For example, if
the students should learn argumentation and not
only the content of the arguments, the teacher
should implement teaching situations where the
students have to debate and produce arguments.
Developing argumentation could also help stu-
dents to learn how to argue and also the content of
arguments. Similarly, introducing ideas about the
nature of science can be made in diverse teaching
situations such as discussing experimental results,
designing experiments, constructing hypotheses,
etc. These ideas can also be introduced together
with new conceptual knowledge. In short, intro-
ducing diverse components of knowledge and sci-
entific practices as objects to be taught makes
teaching situations and their progression particu-
larly complex to design. In the framework of
didactic transposition, the teachers or the designers
should carefully analyze the reference practices in
order to choose among their components those that
they want to teach and how they adapt them; thus,
the unavoidable distance between the reference
practices and those involved in teaching is recog-
nized and analyzed. For example, the idea of
authenticity sometimes proposed for enquiry
teaching cannot lead to a simple reproduction of
the practices of reference. The authenticity can
only be partial.
The planning of the objects of knowledge is
less complex when they are discretized and mainly
content oriented. The teaching order is not always
easy to choose, but the choices can be discussed;
for example, voltage might be introduced first to
characterize batteries, followed by current, or the
reverse. However, when the objects of knowledge
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are components of practices rather distant from
those of the students, such as scientific practices
or even social debates, the planning is much more
difficult. For example, the development of prac-
tices of debating in the science domain (which can
include societal issues) can be associated with the
development of conceptual understanding of other
objects of knowledge or considered as a separate
object of knowledge, and thus, additional teaching
time is necessary. The introduction of practices to
be taught constrains teachers to establish certain
types of relationships with their students, for
example, that different points of view should be
accepted and taken into account in the classroom,
that the dialogue between students is important,
and so on. Hence, it may alter the didactic contract
(contrat didactique) (Brousseau 1997) between the
teacher and the students. Such changes in relation-
ships cannot be introduced rapidly; the classroom
practices take time to be modified. Planning
involves delineating different elements of the
knowledge to be taught at least for their introduc-
tion. For example, some components of energy
might be associated with argumentation, whereas
astronomy might be associated with the limits of
science.
In sum, the didactic transposition is
a theoretical tool to analyze and develop the
official curriculum and also to implement the
teaching practices.
Cross-References
▶ Constructivism
▶ Curriculum
▶ Didaktik
▶ Relevance T
▶ Teaching and Learning Sequences
References
Brousseau G (1997) Theory of didactical situations in
mathematics. Kluwer, Dordrecht
Chevallard Y (1989) On didactic transposition theory:
some introductory notes. Paper presented at the
international symposium on selected domains of
research and development in mathematics
education, Bratislava, 3–7 August 1988. Symposium
proceedings, pp 51–62. Retrieved 7 Aug 2013.
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http://yves.chevallard.free.fr/spip/spip/article.php3?id_
article¼122
Chevallard Y (1991) La transposition didactique. Du
savoir savant au savoir enseigné, 2nd edn. La Pensée
Sauvage Editions, Grenoble
To go further into the theoretical
perspectives
Chevallard Y, Sensevy G (2013) Anthropological
approaches in mathematics education: French
Transposition Didactique
perspectives. In: Lerman S (ed) Encyclopedia of math-
ematics education. Springer, Dordrecht
An example of the use of the didactic
transposition in designing a teaching
sequence
Tiberghien A, Vince J, Gaidioz P (2009) Design-based
research: case of a teaching sequence on mechanics.
Int J Sci Educ 31(17):2275–2314