Classifying in primary school: is it excluded? The case of the platypus

Our paper propose to understand how the reading of the French storybook Mais ou est donc Ornicar? (Glasauer and Stehr, 2000) allows taking in consideration the problematic question of classification in scientific and social ways with pupils from 9 to 11 years old. The particularity of this storybook is to bring in a "strange" animal Ornicar, the Platypus, which is hard to classify for the teacher the main character of the story. Ornicar is the new one of the class in which the pupils are all animals. The learning situation studied originates in the complication to which the characters of the story are confronted: what group can Ornicar, the new one of the class, belong to? Data are made up of 21 narratives produced by the pupils from three classes. These narratives, which develop possible solutions for the inclusion of the Platypus, work as exploratory tools to find whether these pupils from disadvantaged districts the problematic tensions between inclusion and exclusion but also between group and criterion of classification. We conclude that the commitment of the pupils in a complex scientific thought on classification suppose: On the one hand to go beyond certain prejudice in the observation of a new animal and to consider it in the same way that any other animal: what features share this animal with the others? On the other hand, to take into account the social dimension of classification in order to distinguish with the pupils the subjective and objective features.