The specifities we have observed in the way some groups of students carried out their work in an undergraduate course didactic laboratory, made us to reflect on the possibility of understanding the group dynamics process from elements lying beyond the cognitive reach. In analogy to W. R. Bion's view about the working of group therapy, we could give meaning to these elements and interpret the students' behavior in a didactic laboratory situation from a more integrated perspective, so to speak, in order to attempt bringing closer subjectivity and cognition. More specifically, the conduction and the support of student groups dynamics, from the construction of the very experimental context viewpoint, were made explicit on a interplay basis, on which a group structures itself: by one hand, the non-conscious strategies anonymously shared and, by the other hand, the individuals' conscious objectives, intentions and efforts to work from their more objective task.
Didactic laboratory; groups work; psychoanalysis; cognition; subjectivity; Physics teaching