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The concept of devolution was introduced into the field of education in the 1980s from disciplinary didactics, when these were constituted as scientific fields, and more particularly the didactics of mathematics, in order to describe the “act by which the teacher makes the student accept responsibility for a learning situation (adidactic) or a problem and himself or herself accepts the consequences of this transfer” (Brousseau 1988, p. 325). For more than 40 years, various uses of the concept have led to its heterogeneous diffusion and trivialization in the field of training, teaching and educational practices. Its success has led it to traverse decades and disciplines, amplifying the scope of study contexts and with it the variety of questions and practices that devolution processes can raise for researchers, trainers, teachers and, more generally, educational actors.

In the field of educational research, there is still a multiplicity of works conducted under the filter of the concept. The teaching of mathematics, the original source of the concept, still finds a robust support there for shedding light on the studies carried out (Sarrazy 2007; Matheron 2011; Prioret 2014). Other disciplinary courses take it up in order to study practices, for example in history (Cariou 2013), PE (physical education) (Thépaut and Léziart 2008) and technology (Andreucci Chatonay 2006); sometimes curricular dynamics, for example, in economics and management (Panissal and Brossais 2012); sometimes their own didactic science, for example, in French (Rosier 2005). Although it crosses disciplines, the concept of devolution also extends beyond them, for example, by leaving school subject teaching, or even leaving school, for example, by going to study the processes in question in the fields of sports training, special education, early childhood education (Le Paven et al. 2007) or teacher professional development (Sensevy et al. 2005).

The concept of devolution still appears to be particularly topical. Perhaps this is the sign of a form of heuristics that is never exhausted. What then makes it so relevant? What does it bring more than another concept? Moreover, what relevance does it have today, after having supported researchers for 40 years? Can its midlife crisis be constructive for educational researchers?

The need to leave some responsibility to the learners is obvious and shared today, as it has been for many philosophers of education and for many pedagogues and pedagogical movements in the past, long before the concept of devolution was introduced. Hubert Vincent shows this in greater detail in this book using as a basis the proposals of Montaigne and Alain. Moreover, we would probably find in almost all the actors and thinkers in education, affiliated with the qualifier “pedagogue”, an idea, a project or simply a sensitivity that evokes the process of devolution. It is not a question here of rewriting the history of pedagogy through the filter of the concept of devolution. However, by way of introduction, a brief but fulfilling stop can be envisaged. Indeed, an elegant connection was made by Alain Marchive between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Guy Brousseau, going D’Émile à Gaël (Marchive 2006). The reader is invited to browse through this text and its sources, simply by including here a few excerpts from the writings of the two authors put in parallel.

As a result, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes “keep the child in the sole dependence of things, you will have followed the order of nature in the progress of his education” (Rousseau 1966, p. 101), or “do not give your pupil any verbal lesson; he should only receive experience from it” (Rousseau 1966, p. 110). Guy Brousseau emphasizes that it is necessary to “propose to Gaël suitable didactic situations where knowledge is not to be taken from discourse or from the teacher’s desire, but from a relationship with the environment” (Brousseau 1980, p. 124). Jean-Jacques Rousseau reminds us that it is not a question of letting the child construct knowledge according to his or her contingent encounters with the environment: “no doubt he should only do what he wants; but he should only want what you want him to do; he should not take a step unless you have foreseen it” (Rousseau 1966, p. 150). In contrast, Guy Brousseau affirms the resolutely active dimension of the teacher: “the teacher proposes a game, the didactic situation, i.e. the rules of the child’s interactions with a system – a problem situation” (Brousseau 1980, p. 126). Finally, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasizes the tension inherent in this active posture of one subject aiming at the activity of another, he refers to the invisibility of the didactic intention (“he learns all the better as he sees nowhere the intention to instruct” (Rousseau 1966, p. 149)), Guy Brousseau subjects it to disguise: “knowledge and the project of teaching will have to advance under a mask” (Brousseau 1998, p. 73). With Émile and Gaël, Jean-Jacques and Guy, it seems that the subjects of devolution have been sharing their lives for a long time, even when the horizon of the transmission of knowledge seems to draw different paths for them.

It is then necessary to be able to take a step back to refine the understanding of the specific scientific and social stakes of the concept of devolution, as it has emerged in the didactic field; all the more so to characterize and valorize its contemporary stakes. These specific stakes seem to us to be strongly attached to the specific sensitivity of this didactic field. Generally speaking, it can be condensed into an importance attributed to the fields of knowledge specifically taught and can be found amongst almost all didacticians. This can be ascertained from the most notable evocations of this sensitivity, from the early years – “a responsibility with respect to the content of the discipline” (Martinand 1987, p. 24) – to the present day – “the importance of content and disciplines“ (Reuter 2019, p. 36), or even to the point of having a bit of fun with it collectively – “a passionate epistemological, cultural and political fetishism towards the discipline” (Chevallard 2007, p. 18), and then to put to work, with all the didacticians, epistemological rules, anthropological structures, social configurations, political games and psychic constructions that support these specificities. This attachment to the specificity of what is taught is in itself interesting to think about, in the continuity of pedagogical traditions inspired by questions of transmission, inasmuch as it is consubstantial with didactics and is thus evidence of a specific way of thinking about education and, in particular, autonomy. By extension, we can consider that in some way every didactic approach is part of a passionate attachment to normativity, and that the world of didactics begins where a subject will “use the normative power of something so that someone becomes, or more simply, is autonomous” (Buznic-Bourgeacq 2019, p. 241). It is by entering through norms, through institutions, through subjection, through the pre-existing objects of the world that autonomy will be made possible. Alain already said, as Hubert Vincent shows in this work, that the child should be forced to try or to take the initiative; a formula that is certainly paradoxical, and which condenses Guy Brousseau’s idea supported by the concept of devolution.

The didactician then finds their place and, in devolution, their specific stake: it is necessary to study in detail the transmitted objects and the actual activity of a subject engaged by these objects in order to make another subject happen. In other words, it is necessary to analyze precisely what is devolved, what the objects of devolution are, and it is necessary to closely study the activity of the subject being devolved and the objects that the tutor themself manipulates to deploy their activity of devolution jointly with those to whom it is addressed. This is what the present work proposes investigating in an original form.