“La didactique” is the theory of teaching, a “space of theories and research focused on teaching and learning” (of French, of writing, of another discipline…) (Reuter, 1995, p. 15). This field, focused on the study of the processes of teaching and learning, is divided by the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l’éducation et de la formation in three sub-areas: practitioners’ didactics, normative didactics, and critical-prospective didactics. The third area is most relevant here. The research effected in writing didactics serves to improve our understanding of learning and to make decisions about teaching (without presuming any “application” of research results directly in the classroom!). At the heart of the domain of didactics is the exploration of learning not as the transmission of knowledge but as reconstruction and appropriation of knowledge, a movement in which writing plays a vital role.
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