The two teachers will be working in tandem on a new project aimed at reintegrating the rhetorical discipline into high school, based on concrete proposals for action. Secondary school teaching focuses on text commentary rather than debate, argumentation or creativity. At a time when social networks and algorithms tend to confine each individual to the increasingly impenetrable sphere of his or her convictions and presuppositions, using rhetoric, particularly via exercises inherited from ancient culture, should encourage the development of linguistic and discursive skills and, more broadly, empathy and critical thinking.
Planned over three years, this new initiative aims to work with a team of teachers to explore the largely extinct rhetorical pedagogical culture, and to co-produce tested and evaluated teaching resources with them. To achieve this, the teachers have joined forces with Emmanuelle Danblon (member of the Académie Royale de Belgique), Lucie Donckier de Donceel (post-doctoral fellow) and Benjamin Sevestre-Giraud (post-doctoral fellow and agrégé de Lettres classiques).
The project is part of a three-stage strategy:
- training a group of volunteer teachers in the contributions of contemporary research on rhetoric and its readings;
- accompany them in the creation of new rhetorical content and observe their practices;
- identify their specific needs to determine the levers for action in favor of a new teaching of rhetoric.
Several pedagogical activity models will be tested and evaluated, with the help of the Innovation, Data and Experimentation in Education (IDEE) program. The results will be presented in research articles in the fields of French didactics and rhetorical theory.
This project is part of the Collège de France's Agir pour l'éducation initiative .
With the support of the Collège de France Foundation and its sponsors.
