Abstract
In French secondary school, biology education courses include two specific topics: health education and environmental education. We think that any education process contains individual and social values that can be expressed either explicitly or implicitly. Our aim was to look for the values expressed within these two topics in school textbooks. To identify individual values, we analyzed the book chapters related to health education since this theme can be more associated with personal concerns. To identify social values, we analyzed the chapters related to environmental education since this topic involves more collective aims. For each theme, we constructed a specific analysis grid, both of the grids with an inductive perspective based on a linguistic approach. We used two different conceptual frameworks to identify either the individual or the social values. For the individual values, we used the concept of value as defined by Reynaud (2008): “Representation or term deeply affectively ingrained and consequently being able to play a psychological upholding role in designating what is fine, good, beautiful or true in a more or less explicit way”. For the social values, we used the concept of value as described by Durkheim (1911): a value is a fundamental principle of the judgement of thoughts and actions shared by the members of a community. Using this methodology we could evaluate the expression of explicit values in the analyzed school textbooks.