CONSTRUCTING AN EXPERIMENTAL RELATIONSHIP
TO LIVING BEINGS 

Maryline Coquidé

This text presents a synthesis of historical and educational researches. It examines missions and functions of an experimental relationship to living beings at school.

Through the development of information and communication systems to teach, which place should an experimental point of view in biology hold at school? Indeed there is more and more pressure for many reasons (ethical, security, economical, school time and space…), more and more controversies about the purposes of experimental works, and ambiguities and confusions regarding the role of experimental activities in the teaching of biology. At the moment, in France, experience and experimental activities about living beings are decreasing at school. How to think experience and experimentation of the living beings at school?

The history of science shows how a construction of an experimental science for the living has requested the overcoming of several obstacles, and I suggest comparing empirical and experimental attitude. Then, I present different school ways of constructing an experimental relationship to living beings and I distinguish "experiencial" attitude, control empirical attitude and experimental attitude. By organising experimental situations in the classroom or in the laboratory in order to study living beings, in their complexity and various appearances, we avoid teaching in a too limited way and we fully promote an effective biological education.

Different questions and points of view are developed and analysed:
•	Which missions of constructing an experimental relationship to living beings at school?
•	Which scientific practices and experimental relationship to living beings in research?
•	Which attitudes in order to construct a relationship to living beings at school?