Zoom sur la citoyenneté : action des classes de 3èmes en classe d’anglais

À l’école de la citoyenneté… : l’école française pour former des citoyennes et citoyens

L’éducation à la citoyenneté, à une citoyenneté active et consciente, relève des missions de l’école à la française dont l’objectif essentiel est de former de futurs citoyens et citoyennes éclairés, dotés de libre arbitre, responsables et sensibles au bien commun. Tout le parcours de l’élève, de l’école au lycée, concourt à cette formation.

Ci dessous le témoignage de Mme Helene Wang, professeure d’anglais, à l’initiave d’un projet impliquant les classes de troisièmes dans le processus d’apprentissage d’une citoyenneté éclairée et libre.

This year the American presidential election coincided with the local elections in Kyiv, Ukraine. Therefor, I decided to work around the theme of elections and the democraitc process with my two classes of 3me.

We launched the project with a few lessons about basic rhetorics. We learned about different ways of expressing similar opinions, looked at logial and emotional argumentation, as well as the integrety and reliability established by the speaker. We started off with a few world famous teenagers, who have impacted the political scene.

After this, we started looking at the presidential candidates and the voting system in the states. We focussed on the American elections, but occasionally drew lines towards the Ukrainian reality. We selected four politicians, and did presentations in groups. Each group had to present a candidate either as a supporter or an opponent to that candidate, or in a neutral way. Then we looked at how different rhetorics evolved in the discussions.

At the same time, we followed the news – the announcement of Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barett as well as the continuous activity of previous presidential candidates such as Warren and Sanders.

The second part of our project evolved around making our own democratic parties. As I am teaching both classes on the same level – the last year of the cycle, I decided to do the project as a cross class project, that included the students from 6me, 5me and 4me.

The prompt to the students in 3me was “If I were president of the school, what would I change”? We did a brainstorm session in each class, and came up with 8-10 subject that needed work. Then we grouped them roughly, and divided them into two categories. The discussion on how to group the subjects was difficult and interesting, and we noticed the impossibility of agreeing with everything that happens within a party. After this process, each student position him/herself in one of the parties – two per class. The parties now got together and started discussing. They had to make a list of priotities, the issues they concidered most important. Understanding that they had to make some choices and sacrifices, they negotiated their way to compromise. In two cases, a student chose to swich party, and one group was on the brim of losing four members to a breakout party. They did however reconsider, and remained together in one party, overcoming their disagreements.

Three of the parties elected a main candidate, and kept the remaining students as “expert advisors” on the different priority sibjects. One party, consisting of three boys, decided to run for elections as a cooperative rather than ar hierachical structure.

When everything was outlined, the students had to create election materials. We returned to our talks about rhetorics, and discussed how to convice the voters – the younger students in the school – to vote for the candidate/party. We distrubuted flyers, hung posters, made logos and slogans, and opened instagram accounts. Finally, we produced four election videos, one for eahc party. These videos were shown to the younger classes, who voted for the prefered candidate. Votes were anonymous.

Ideally, we would like to have had actual debates between opposing parties, but the sanitary situation did not allow to organise that. (As a sidenote, we talked about how social media works in campaigns, and agreed that all materials produced in school could be released on social media only of all included persons would give their concent. We also touched upon manipulation and fake news).

We ended up with four very different styles of videos. Some used humor or even sarcasm, some went for logical convincing, some went for a feel good mood. On election day, after showing the videos to the younger classes (due to Covid, I had allied myself with their teachers, who offered a couple of minutes of their lessons to watch the videos) we watched each other’s work and analysed the different messages, and how they were brought across.

The students were very enthusiastic about the project, they worked hard, and the multifacetted nature of the project allowed students of dfferent levels and interest to find a place and task that suited them.

Watch the winning party’s movie here : Vidéo