A Conceptual Toolkit for Approaching, Evaluating, and Developing Training Programs

The idea of a dispositive approach is not new. It meets the concerns of a community of researchers who carry out educational research using the notion of activity. The present contribution is part of this overall movement, but it concerns a particular issue since it involves the question of how and why evaluate a training system? It falls into two parts : approaching a system with the perspective of evaluating it and evaluating it to contribute to its development. We describe it as the activation of a dialogue which strives to apprehend and unbridle a state of positive creation. It promotes what Barbier (2001) calls research in intelligibility and invites us to turn a field of practice into a field of research. The present state of conceptual tools is presented in this text. It is extracted from experiences which all relate to the training of adults and young adults.