The potentially differentiating characteristics of teaching materials and how they are considered by primary school teachers

This article first seeks to identify the potentially differentiating characteristics of teaching materials, i.e. it looks at their semiotic and discursive heterogeneity and the framing of the intellectual activities they propose. We then ask: how do teachers take this into account in the classroom? To explore this, we examine teaching practices in France and analyze history lessons from two 4th-grade teachers. These teachers (working in schools in working-class neighbourhoods, in REP) use the same teaching resource but, nevertheless, they take account of the characteristics of the material in different ways, which could lead to more or less demanding learning and create social inequalities in learning. Thus, while classroom materials and their attributes play an important role, they do not solely determine usage or learning outcomes.