Abstract
This research reports on the experience of a school teacher, a volunteer and a female swimming instructor engaged in a partnership to teach swimming to primary school pupils. Using the enactive framework, we studied their individual and collective activity, focusing in particular on their concerns and knowledge. The challenge of our work is to determine how actors of different status engaged together in a partnership transform their experience in its course. With reference to the research programme of the course of action (Theureau, 2004, 2006, 2015) articulated with the theory of inquiry (Dewey, 1938), we have analysed their activity in a longitudinal way on a teaching sequence of swimming skills. By filming three sessions and conducting self-confrontation interviews, we collected datas to characterize the activity of this triad of actors and to answer the following questions: In what way and how do the concerns and knowledge resulting from the experience contribute to the construction of each individual's activity? How is the collective activity of the three actors composed in this generic project of teaching swimming?On the basis of an entanglement of multiple processes, our results reveal an opposition between a long temporality experienced by the teacher and a temporality of the "ephemeral" experienced by the other actors. This opposition generates disruptions and influences the routine activity of each. The analyses also underline that the actors, by recurrently overflowing the prescriptions relative to their different status, offer significant opportunities and resources that transform the activity of the triad. These results lead us to defend the thesis that the partnership between actors of different status generates, in the school setting, cooperative (during which the actors help each other), tactical (during which the actors are neutral) and competitive (during which the actors oppose each other) processes. These interrelated processes transform the knowledge of all actors. Furthermore, our work leads to proposals for methodological enrichment of the course of action research programme through the notions of 'reflexive and interpretative elements', 'Histories' and 'inquiry'.