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‪This article examines the relationship between the development of students’ critical historical skills and learning scientific knowledge about the past from the point of view of the teacher involved in our collaborative research. These relationships are at the root of a significant professional problem for teachers, for whom the weakness of students’ knowledge tends to hinder their development of critical skills. The theoretical framework of learning by problematisation behind the experiments that underpin this article opens the way to the reconstruction of the issue of student ignorance through the concept of an epistemological obstacle, which places the students’ already-existing knowledge derived from their experiences of the social world, at the heart of classroom activity. On this basis, the reluctance shown by the teacher during one of the experimental sequences constitutes a relevant event for interpreting the conditions of the transition from comprehensive contextualisation to school-based historical contextualisation. The article’s interpretation is based on the analysis of interactions between researchers and teachers concerning students’ oral and written productions based on a sequence on the French Revolution.‪