Comparative didactics: Toward a generic model for analyzing content-specific dimensions of teaching quality

Since the 2000s, the Joint Action framework in Didactics (JAD) has been developed in the context of the expansion of the French-speaking research in Comparative didactics. Studies carried out with this framework typically investigate how knowledge content develop in teacher-student classroom interactions. From a quite different perspective, classroom research on teaching quality has also developed considerably in recent years. Despite the many efforts to better understand relations between generic versus subject-specific dimensions of teaching, this dichotomy remains strong in the debates on teaching quality. This contribution explores a comparative model for characterizing the quality of teaching practices from the conceptual categories of the Joint Action framework in Didactics (JAD-MTQ). Based on the comparison of teaching and learning practices in two school subjects—physics and contemporary dance—this paper pursues a twofold objective: (1) proposing a provisional set of generic criteria for capturing content-specific dimensions of teaching quality; and (2) highlighting certain methodological conditions for ensuring qualitative analyses of these dimensions of teaching quality.