French High Schools experienced a national reform plan in 2010 incorporating exploration courses breaking with traditional teachings. This granted more freedom in their conception as potential curriculums because these courses can involve career choice and thus enable students to explore both curriculums and professional environments. A partnership, named EDIFICE, set up by the University of Orléans, France, is a potential curricular form of the course entitled “Scientific methods and practices” for 10th grade students. In the first phase of the project, a partnership between research labs and High Schools has been set up in order to involve High School students in the research activities of PhD Students in their labs. Each PhD student works with two to six students who are themselves chaperoned by a High School teacher. The educational context of the labs makes it necessary to define the exploration, in order to constitute the theoretical foundation of this work. The implementation of the EDIFICE project is then questioned and compared to a curricular approach associated to the notion of social practice of reference: 1) How do the students explore the social practices of reference in the labs? 2) How do they explore the practices of PhD research? 3) How are the explorations in labs co-produced by the PhD student, the students, and the chaperoning High School teacher? Our data covers the 26 groups of PhD students, High School students and chaperoning teachers over the first year of implementation of the project. Data analysis consisted of the written answers provided by the students, the interviews of the three types of participants, the observations’ notes made during a conference of the High School students and the labs visits. Lab notebooks and slide shows from the High School students’ conference are also studied, as well as research articles, presentation materials, and the PhD thesis from the PhD students involved in the project. First of all, it can be observed that students have numerous representations of sciences and the social practices of researchers since they have realized the importance of the written medium, of the flows of networking information and are now able to perceive the lab as a space for collaboration. The experience of the resistance of the real and phenomenotechnique contribute to remove the partitions between sciences, technologies, and society. The sciences in action are considered, by some, as imagined or invented and this experience enables, more generally speaking, to enlarge the possibilities of course and career choices for the High School students involved. Then, four distinct modes of exploration of PhD research are inferred. One mode is focused on the acquisition of general concepts of the thesis, another one transposes synthetically one approach of the PhD research. A third mode corresponds to the personal approach of the formulation of the research question. In the ethnographic mode, the research is explored at a given moment, without adaptation. The explorations of the students seem dependent on the epistemology of the researched discipline. Finally, the chaperoning teachers and the students have a major influence on the nature of the explorations during the process of co-production which leads to modifications of the conception of the potential curriculum. The possibility for each and one of the participants to explore is discussed in connection with a mutual enrichment made possible by the partnership framework of the EDIFICE project.