The Pedagogy of the Text (PoT)

The Pedagogy of the Text approach offers a teaching method that enables children, youngsters or adults to acquire knowledge useful for their development (i.e. adapted to their needs) and that will be able to use to impact their environment (individually or as a memeber of a community).

Developed by IDEA in 1987 and used ever since by various partners in Africa, Latin America, in the Middle East and in the Caribbean, the PoT is constituted of a set of pedagogical principles coming from textual/speech linguistics, socio-interactionist psychology, pedagogy and discipline didactics but also of real experiments developed in the field of language basic education, of mathematics, of social sciences and of natural sciences.

The name of the approach results from the importance given to the text in the educational process. The text is, indeed, the central vector of the teaching and learning of all knowledge, because it is through « useful » texts, that is to say coming from reality (administrative letter, a user's guide for fertilizers, a bankbook, etc.), that the learner studies not only French but also natural sciences or mathematics.

One of the PoT principles is to, always start from the learner's empirical knowledge (what he already knows) to compare it to the scientific knowledge the learner is about to acquire (what we wish to teach him). This is a crucial approach to guarantee the critical ownership of a new knowledge, to make one feel like learning, and which, thus, puts the learner as well as the teacher at the center of the process.

Through the years, PoT convinced numerous partners who integrated the approach in their practices with the aim to assure a quality education in the South. Trainings going more or less into detail are organized according to the needs, and PoT Master's degree was created. Intended for trainers coming from different countries, who in turn train teachers, counselors in their field of origin, it has gathered a first class (2003-2006) of 45 trainers from Burkina Faso, Niger, Benin, Congo, the Cape Verde Islands, Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala and from El Salvador aiming to obtain a Master's degree issued by the Universities of Sao Paulo in Brazil and of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, after a 3-year curriculum (a month of classes and 4 months of practice on the field). A second class started the next cycle that will take place with the collaboration of the Medellin University, in Colombia, and of the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.