Abstract EN:

In an age of multiple and deep-seated transformations in the world, this thesis offers a first-hand account that is grounded in society. It is drawn both from practical experience of France's popular education movement and from reflections on the importance of informal conversations in daily life. Acting reciprocally between generations, such conversations allow, via a process of communicational interactivity(agir communicationnel) the development of bodies of knowledge that are of use in the business of human existence. Studying this process involves an exploration of interactions between the informal and the formal. Such interactions range between 'common' or vernacular knowledge of experience or existence; simple know-how (savoir-faire) and the instinct for transmitting information (faire-savoir), and, based on both of these, learned and theoretical knowledge, and the self-conscious construction of learning; and the transmission of knowledge between generations. The study of the oral transmission of knowledge is based on the examples of the pedagogical, and democratic, use of the conversation as a tool by Socrates; on the 'council-trees' of African tribes; and on the practice of Marc Sangnier at the beginning of the twentieth century. It demonstrates how speech in action, both as rhetoric (illocutoire) and as conversation (interlocutoire), as well as the synergy between the oral and the written word, builds links between individuals, within the social space of both public and private spheres, developing in the temporal dimension of daily life. To show this, this study relies on an age-graded sample of nine people (of between 20 and 80 years old) whose recorded conversations demonstrate how, as a function of social events, they involve themselves in, and ask themselves questions about, daily realities while at the same time developing a body of learning.