This paper proposes that the teacher, on the basis of action-research methodology, can produce two types of scienti® c knowledge: one based on the teacher as researcher (the teacher as ethnographer), and another based on the development of pedagogic action (the teacher as educator). The education of such a teacher, simultaneously a researcher and an educator, is carried out through the concretisation of that which has denominated the interface of intercultural education. The development of this interface renders possible the management of diversity by the teacher. This diversity is present both in the school, as well as, more speci® cally, in the classroom. It can also be seen as a source of wealth for the further deepening of the democratic nature of both the school and the education system.In the rst part of this article, we reiterate the claim that education is structured (and informed) by speci c epistemological characteristics distinct from those that organise research in the experimental sciences. On the basis of these characteristics, it is argued that an educational process that endeavours to take into account the socio-cultural diversity of its pupils will need to develop within a climate of action-research.The "hybrid and polyglot nature" of education: source of wealth and/or factor of vulnerability?In 1992, the French epistemologist Jacques Ardoino wrote:"The paradox of the Educational Sciences (ill-loved due to the domestic character of educational praxis, which itself is a consequence of the hybrid and polyglot nature of their notions, a result of the different languages they use and of the complexity of the representations they elaborate) is, undoubtedly, connected to the fact that such 'impurity' (even more noticeable than in other elds of study) does not allow us to easily forget that the acknowledgement of heterogeneity and temporality, thought to be irreducible, are none other than the fundamental conditions of scienti c work insofar as the sciences of man and society are concerned" (Ardoino; 1992: 8).

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