For three years now, the Haute école de pédagogie Vaud (HEP-VAUD) and the University of Lausanne have been keenly interested in improving the teaching of poetry in compulsory and post-compulsory education. The website poesie-en-classe.ch – which highlights tools available to teachers – was inaugurated in 2018, and is presented below by Professor José Ticon.
This sharing platform was created out of a desire to rejuvenate the didactics of poetry to offer new prospects on the genre. Indeed, it all too often comes with numerous representations from the students. With this in mind, poesie-en-classe.ch promotes an introduction and reading of poetry that is more in line with the reader’s personal experience. A number of skills are fostered in this process, notably those included in the Plan d’études romand (the PER, the curriculum of Western Switzerland). These tools enable, among others, greater thought about the voice and body within a text.
Implemented in 2010 in all Western cantons and serving as a compass for teaching practice, the PER aims to ensure greater homogeneity and precision in the objectives to be met in the various cycles of compulsory schooling. Its gradual entry into force is also based on the adoption of Western teaching resources defined in the PER.
For French as a subject, the creation of this framework is based on the notion of genres and groupings of genres common to the three cycles of schooling, namely: texts that tell or relate; texts that argue; texts that impart knowledge; texts that regulate behaviours (first and second cycle), and texts that play with language – namely, poetic texts. Poetry therefore lies squarely within the genres to be taught in school in terms of both written and oral comprehension and production skills.
How does one go about boosting the didactics of poetry? The website poesie-en-classe.ch is there for precisely that!