Abstract
In secondary school, a large number of teachers expect students who arrive from the college to know how to document themselves and to be independent of the CDI Force that this is not the case at present. The mission circular for staff working in the Documentation and Information Centres assigns documentalists the responsibility (inter alia) to initiate and train students in documentary research. We will try to demonstrate that the problem is wider and not limited to an initiation cycle. By means of an ethnographic study, we will study the way students work, when they need to carry out documentary research at the CDI as part of a course. We will try to highlight the way teachers teach in the way they work. We will compare two education systems to understand how knowledge is built in each case.