A gestural observation of teaching activity: what are the effects of an encounter between researcher and practitioner in a multilingual context?
A collaborative research on Tahiti elementary school teachers’ effective practices, and particularly Polynesian languages and culture teaching, led a teacher to transform within a few months the interactional dynamics with her pupils during the lessons. The mere presence of the metropolitan researcher impacted the practice of this teacher, which we offer to analyse with her. This case study, based on a theory of activity in an orientation of professional didactics articulated to an interactionist linguistic theory, enables to show that an analysis which favours taking into account gestures, postures and artefacts in school situation, in association with interviews with the teacher, gives access to cultural dimensions in the meaning of her activity.