L’altérité:  une composante clé de l'apprentissage par l'expérience?

Abstract

Taking the view that learning is only learning when it is accompanied by experience, this research focuses on the identifiable variables of this experiential dimension. To do this, the researchers followed learners as they discovered cultural otherness through the Dialogue en route project (https://enroute.ch/fr/), which involves a dual encounter with a cultural site and a witness to that site. To reach the learners' semiosis, the researchers documented their learning activity using two types of trace, visual and verbal. Because of their fundamentally different intrinsic characteristics, the two types of trace opened up a process-space of intelligibility that enabled the researchers to empirically document the complexity of meaning-making, its situated nature and its potential impact on learning. To this end, the temporality of trace production was used as an instrument, since the learners photographed moments in the double encounter situation and then captioned them afterwards. Reconstructing the situation as it unfolded turned the visual and verbal modalities into semiotic resources that the learners used to reconstruct their potential experience. For the researchers, the study of the relationships between these two modal traces makes it possible to qualify the experience lived by the learners. The limited number of so-called 'rupture' relationships between the images and their verbal captions, revealing a singular experience with a high learning potential, raises questions about both the pedagogical device and the emergence of collectively constructed knowledge, captured here in its 'average' restitution rather than in its negotiation.