Seeds of Tellers

The project

The mastery of speech is the foundation of all learning:
Before learning to read and write, the child must learn to speak

Extrait du guide pédagogique “Le conte à l’école pour maîtriser la parole“

The Seeds of Tellers project aims to highlight the importance of orality in fostering fundamental learning in the early years of schooling. It provides teachers with a series of tools to help them set up workshops on orality in their classrooms, without the need for a written medium.

Context

19.7% of students in the European Union had reading difficulties in 2015, compared to 17.8% in 2012 (PISA report). Only 4 Member States reached the benchmark of less than 15%. The system has never reproduced social inequalities to such an extent, in the OECD, particularly in France and Belgium. More and more children are entering kindergarten with language difficulties. Exposure to screens makes the situation worse. The lack of elaborate exchanges and vocabulary increases the gap between children of different socio-cultural backgrounds very early on. However, success in learning is associated with mastery of speech, the foundation of all learning.

For the sociologist B. Lahire, mastery of the spoken word and a degree are the main social organizers: those who have learned to speak in public are more often in positions of responsibility.

While 70% of professional expression time is oral, this relationship is reversed at school: the written word dominates teaching practices. The school oral is very often oriented from the pupil to the teacher with the rote, the recitation. Presentations and oral exams are prepared as if they were written. For the school, speech comes from writing.

Today, the question of the oral exam has resurfaced with new tests at the end of the school year. Portugal emphasizes orality, in France and Italy there is a grand oral and a multidisciplinary interview.

Objectives

• Encourage self-confidence
• Listen to and respect the word of others
• Promoting cooperation
• Develop memory, vocabulary
• Encourage the imagination
• Discover and share the European oral cultural heritage
• Addressing the learning inequities that have grown during the health crisis.
• Training students to tell stories orally in class without written support allows them to become emotionally involved, to experience pleasure and to transmit it in order to assert themselves as individuals and find their place in the group. Our credo: “To listen better to speak better, to speak better to think better; because when we think better,

Activities

The partnership based on oral literature, which includes storytelling. Structured narratives, stemming from a common oral heritage, they offer a framework for reasoning, the

memory, imagination…

Children’s storytelling workshops have been held in schools and libraries in Bulgaria, France, Italy, and Portugal.

The partnership has also created the project’s website, which includes all the productions made. These resources are available in each language of the partnership as well as in English and meet accessibility and inclusion standards.

Targets

Through teachers, Seeds of Tellers is aimed at pupils from 5 to 12 years old.

Resources