Didactic Contract

In didactics, the didactic contract is a concept introduced by Guy Brousseau, a French mathematics didactician. He defines it as "the set of teacher behaviors expected by the learner, and the set of learner behaviors expected by the teacher". This didactic contract describes the implicit or explicit rules that frame the sharing of responsibilities between the teacher and the learner in relation to the knowledge mobilized or structured. It is therefore a representation of what both parties expect from each other.

In didactics, the didactic contract is a concept introduced by Guy Brousseau, a French mathematics didactician. He defines it as "the set of teacher behaviors expected by the learner, and the set of learner behaviors expected by the teacher". This didactic contract describes the implicit or explicit rules that frame the sharing of responsibilities between the teacher and the learner in relation to the knowledge mobilized or structured. It is therefore a representation of what both parties expect from each other. In L'Âge du Capitaine, Stella Baruk recounted in 1985, a problem proposed to primary school students: "On a boat, there are 26 sheep and 10 goats. How old is the captain? Among the 97 students¹, 76 gave the age of the captain using the numbers in the statement, i.e. 26+10=36, so the captain is 36 years old." There are two notable unintended consequences. The first can be broken down into several points: the child thinks that a given problem has one answer and one answer only, all the data must be used to arrive at the answer, no additional information is needed, and the solution calls on the knowledge taught. The second is that the student, faced with an exercise, tells themselves that if there was a pitfall, the teacher would have warned him. In this way, the teacher protects their students by ridding them of what seems difficult or out of reach. The child does not control the meaning of the exercise; they simply respond. The children are aware of the incoherence of the proposition, but the classical didactic contract does not require them to decide on the relevance of the problem. The teacher's role is to move from a lay culture made of concrete problems to a scientific culture made of abstract and theoretical problems. The lack of logic in the didactic contract is "the lever for the child to pass into a scientific culture" according to Samuel Joshua and Jean-Jacques Dupin in Introduction à la didactique des sciences et des mathématiques, 1933.

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