Lived experience as a unit of analysis: Towards a second-person approach for learning research

International audienceIn order to track individual learning processes in ecological situations, we develop research in the theoretical perspective of enactivism. As it emphasizes autonomous coupling, we adopt individual experience as a fundamental unit of analysis, defined as an ongoing process which is lived “from within”. In this paper we present methodological procedures fitted with this unit of analysis. Hence we look at the potential, for learning research, of a second-person approach in which accounts of lived experience are relationally constituted.By creating supportive conditions for the evocation of experience, methods such as explicitation interviews and video self-confrontation overcome the weaknesses of spontaneous reports; in situ video records and written traces complete these verbal data. For analyzing theses corpuses, we firstly achieve a comprehensive analysis which strives to keep close from the agent perspective, and secondly a comparative analysis which focuses on categories relative to the research question.Our approach allows investigating the widespread and yet disregarded silent activity of learners. During lectures, it appears to be shaped by complex imbrications of different actions (e.g. listening, taking notes, etc.) regarding different dynamical perturbations (e.g. talks, slides, notes, etc); “backtracking” (retroactively thinking to what was previously expressed) is frequent. We could also study the partial consensuses that teacher and learners reach through a progressive overlapping of only certain knowledge elements they experience. Therefore, choosing lived experience as unit of analysis allows investigating some aspects of the collective level of learning situations by working “outwards”, from individual experience to collective activity