The teaching of geography cultivates a link of identity with the exterior world: the field class. The challenges to the school investigation of institutions, localities and relations are huge. That didactic exercise is the subject of the present text, whose purpose is to show the concerns and progresses by some scholars in the construction of a " theory" of field classes, here denominated classes in the field. The proposal consists in presenting and discussing specific approaches to this kind of classes. However, this cultivation does not happen continuously, and is not at the heart of the planning of school geography. It shows up as an exception, a situation decried by these authors, who characterize limitations and potentialities and point to solutions. For that, they propose the revival of this idea within the various forms that activities external to the school take: excursions, visits, environmental studies, tourism. The pedagogical strength of the class in the field resides, however, in the potential of the teacher-student interaction for apprehending with the world, and for planning itself as it goes, resulting, in the conclusion to this article, in a defense of a strategic posture towards the management of the return to the classroom. Under the title of collective autobiography of the previous class, this text proposes to extend the relevance of the discussions about the field experience to fertilize contents and learning methods, recalling that the class in the field is, like an artistic inspiration, an irreplaceable element in the understanding of the space at the level of the school.
Class in the field; School geography; Fieldwork; Environment