L’histoire collective comme notion descriptive pour l’analyse de l’activité d’élèves engagés dans des situations de coopération en Education Physique

This study aimed to analyze the collective activity of students engaged in cooperative situations in Physical Education (PE) to take account of how they lived and enjoyed their experience of cooperation. We used the notion of collective meaningful story to describe and to characterize the phenomena underlying the cooperation between students. Three students and their teacher were volunteers to participate in this study. Their activity was studied in situ during a circus unit of seven lessons. This study was carried out in accordance with the assumptions of the “Course of action” scientific program (Theureau, 2006). The results show, in the first part, typical categories of collective meaningful stories and the characteristics relating to the temporal arrangement of stories in the units. We identified three characteristics: (a) the diversity of temporal spans, (b) the continuous or discontinuous nature of collective meaningful story development, and (c) patterns of collective meaningful stories. The third part presents a case study which reports on the dynamic of collective meaningful story development during the unit. These results contribute to the understanding of cooperation and provide input for the design of original cooperative learning structures.