Abstract
This article aims to provide an insight into the way teachers in French primary education implement educational projects and, overall, to understand how these projects influence the school. The analysis, focused on organizational learning, aims to describe the schools’ ability to combine action and knowledge production processes. The method relies on an ethnographic research developed in the Ile-de-France region. The data was analyzed using a Grounded Theory perspective. Our results underline the many challenges that the school project poses in the quest to develop original activities which meet ordinary problems. We discovered that the professional development of teachers is an issue at the heart of the educational project since it questions the profession’s pre-existing individual and collective knowledge structures. Our postulate states that professional experiences taking place during the educational project could nourish the knowledge capital emerging from teaching practice both in and outside the classroom. In other words, if the project were to be considered as a process aiming to make school reality intelligible, and not only as a set of actions, it would be possible for teachers to understand and learn from the problems the projects themselves pose.
Educational project; Organization; Primary school; Teacher