Theoretical background to study science education contexts

International audienceEarthquake, volcanic eruption, cyclone, flood, tsunami, the Caribbean are particularly vulnerable to many natural hazards. Citizen Education to hazard mitigation is much more important in French West Indies than in Paris. With national, curriculum, evaluation and textbooks, how science education in French West Indies manage the challenge to take account this particularity of our territories? Based on this example and others, the aim of this communication is to present a science education theoretical background focus on contexts studies. During science teaching, learning effects due to different context like social, cultural or language could be described as contextual effects. But others micro-didactic effects of contexts could also be identified as linked with specificity of natural environment. These effects manifest a strain between a goal of teaching or learning and its implementation, when this stain is due in the educational process in different contexts involved.To ensure the quality of education, reference and quantify the effects of educational context seems to be necessary. it should be interested in the process leading to the emergence of these contexts. We propose a simplified model of these processes initially described as meetings of mechanisms operating within a network of transposition of designs. Then we question these processes by degree or forms of contextualization (low to high) and crossed these two approaches, giving an initial typology of contextualisation process. It then emerges the idea that these processes are constrained by resistances. We retain the following three: epistemological, social and educational. As these constraints are expressed in different ways according to disciplines, the data suggest the existence of disciplinary contextualization profiles. All these three approaches (network implementation, degree of contextualization, disciplinary profiles) are three tools for analyzing contextual phenomena which remain to test the robustness and operational character for the training analysis context