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Within the boundaries of students' professional training, conducting research is a way for them to develop cross-disciplinary skills - reading and understanding theoretical writings - and to learn problem setting and how to analyse different types of documents - theoretical texts, corpora, written data. Textbooks, for their part, can become a means for students to learn about how scholarly knowledge was approached at the time they were written, and to take on the concepts of «schooling» (Kuentz 1972), «didactic transposition» (Chevallard, 1985), «school culture» (Chervel, 1998) and the «history of school subjects» (Chervel, 1998). They can also answer questions on the traditions and educational innovations of their time through the study of the teaching schemes they gave birth to. Finally, they convey value systems, ideologies and even cultures. Nevertheless, their complexity is rarely taken into account, and when they are mentioned it is generally to criticize their weaknesses. Analysing them implies reflecting on didactics; it is an opportunity for students to ponder on the approaches they have implemented during their professional training under a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]