News

Launch of a new Agir pour l'éducation project

Research-action project " Reinventing rhetoric : by whom ? how ? "

Professors William Marx (Chair of Comparative Literatures) and Jean-Luc Fournet (Chair of Written Culture in Late Antiquity and Byzantine Papyrology) join the Agir pour l'Education initiative, launched by the professors of the Collège de France to promote scientific research, experimentation and results, in the service of schools and equal opportunities.

Le projet « Réinvestir la rhétorique. Pourquoi ? Comment ? » est porté par les professeurs William Marx et Jean-Luc Fournet et mené sur le terrain par Lucie Donckier, Sarah Pariser et Benjamin Sevestre-Giraud. Il est le tout premier projet de l’initiative « Agir pour l’Éducation » à être entièrement consacré à l'enseignement du français au collège et au lycée.

Photo groupe de travail projet APE "Réinvestir la rhétorique" — Demosthenes practicing his speech by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ (1842-1923), private collection. - Wikimedia commons

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.