This book examines the textual, social, cultural, practical and institutional environments to which the expression “teaching and learning contexts” refers. It  reflects on the extent to which studying such environments helps us to better understand ancient or modern sources, and how notions of “teaching” and “learning” are to be understood.
Tackling two problems: the first, is that of certain sources of scientific knowledge being studied without taking into account the various “contexts” of transmission that gave this knowledge a long-lasting meaning.

The second is that other sources are related to teaching and learning activities, but without being too precise and demonstrative about the existence and nature of this “teaching context”. In other words, this book makes clear what is meant by “context” and highlights the complexity of the practice hidden by the words “teaching” and “learning”. Divided into three parts, the book makes accessible teaching and learning situations, presents comparatist approaches, and emphasizes the notion of teaching as projects embedded in coherent treatises or productions.

Table of contents

Alain Bernard and Christine Proust: General introduction

Part 1 - Holistic approach

• Anne-Marie Chartier: The Teaching Context and Reading between the 16th and 18th Centuries: The Role of the Memorization of Texts in Learning
• Philippe Clancier: Teaching and learning Medicine and Exorcisme at Uruk during the Hellenistic Period

Part 2 - Critical approach

• Christine Proust: Does a Master always Write for his Students? Some Evidence from Old Babylonian Scribal Schools
• Alain Bernard: In what Sense did Theon's Commentary on the Almagest Have a Didactic Purpose?

Part 3 - Comparative approach

• Stéphane Lamassé: Relationships between French "practical arithmetics" and teaching?
• Andrea Bréard: On the Transmission of Mathematical Knowledge in Versified Form in China
• Giovanna C. Cifoletti: Mathematical Progress or Mathematical Teaching? Bilingualism and Printing in European Renaissance Mathematics

Part 4 - Zooming approach

• Eva Caianiello: Leonardo of Pisa and the Liber Abaci. Biographical elements and the project of the work
• Alexei Volkov: Didactical Dimensions of Mathematical Problems: Weighted Distribution in a Vietnamese Mathematical Treatise
• Florence Bretelle-Establet: Learning and Teaching Medicine in Late Imperial China

Post Face

Karine Chemla: On the sources of the historian of science from the perspective of a history of education

Springer page

NB: Christine Proust a été l'invitée du colloquium ARDM-CFEM 2013, voir le compte rendu de sa conférence