17

The aim of this article is to describe a classroom situation where the teacher has to teach history of the arts to nine-year-olds. This fourth grade class studied a song by the Beatles, A Day in the Life as well as the cover of the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. We analyzed these classes using the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (JATD), in an attempt to understand how this joint action of the teacher and the pupils creates connections between these artistic works and other works that shed light on them within their historical context. Teaching history of the arts involves the interaction of different disciplinary fields. This article attempts to understand the modalities of this encounter. As such, studying this teaching is of great value if we wish to adopt a comparative approach in didactics.