Apprentissage et contexte

Learning and context. Generally speaking we may consider that action refers to a goal and to the means necessary to reach the goal. It is then necessary to distinguish the intentional aspect of action -the goal -and the functional aspect of it -the means used to reach the goal. Consequently a skill may be defined as the capacity of a person to reach a goal in any circumstance using what the environment offers. Any action must then negotiate environmental properties. This capacity to perceive the environment as something to act upon necessitates the construction of what Gibson (1979) called affordance. An affordance may be defined as the knowledge of what environment offers for action. Affordances are built up from relational invariant between an organism and the elements of the environment. These elements may be natural or cultural. All individuals must learn not only to perceive what the environment offers for action, but to enter into the action as well. However, explicitly (schooling institution) or implicitly (material and human environment) what the learner experiences is organised in such a way to allow this learning process. The concept of field of promoted actions will be discussed as a framework to handle this question. Published works on cultural comparative studies on arithmetic learning in children will be given as an illustration.