The notion of didactic transposition sheds light on an object of study for Didactics that sometimes seems hard to grasp and even harder to question: the specific organisation of knowledge at school (and university). What is taught or designed to be taught – for instance about group theory, differential equations, elementary functions or proportionality – are entities with a specific existence including some variations and also invariants through institutional space and time. Their current shape and components appear as the result of a complex process of transposition, full of arbitrariness coming from epistemological as well as pedagogical decisions. The anthropological theory of the didactic (ATD) provides us with theoretical and methodological tools to describe the different knowledge organisations and, moreover, to track down the constraints that contribute to shape them and strongly hinder their teaching and learning. For instance, where does the “study of a function” (or “curve sketching”) technique come from? Why does it appear as a teaching goal in almost all secondary school institutions? Who invented it and for what purpose? What alternatives can be considered?

Einladung von Prof. Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs (Didaktik der Mathematik)