Cordées de la Réussite

La Cordée " Languages and Cultures of the World"

For the past three years, Inalco has been running an educational program for secondary school students, from the fourth to the final year of secondary school, as part of the national Cordées de la Réussite program. Called Langues et Cultures du Monde, the Cordée de l'Inalco offers a whole range of activities where languages and cultures rhyme with knowledge and discovery. Creative and multilingual workshops, cultural visits and activities, meetings with researchers, linguistics and creative writing competitions, introductory workshops in languages taught at Inalco... The aim of all these complementary activities, by putting languages to work, is to support secondary school students, particularly those in priority education zones and urban political districts. In other words, students who experience linguistic diversity and plurilingualism on a daily basis, and for whom Inalco offers a space and an approach that enables them to take hold of it, through discovery, reflection, and creation.

Objectives of the Cordée "Languages and Cultures of the World

• Enable students to discover their potential and develop their personal skills, particularly linguistic ones, to give them self-confidence and self-esteem. Make them aware of their ability to learn foreign languages, whose mastery is a determining factor in professional integration, and help them value their first and family languages, which are too often downplayed.

• Foster students' cultural and scientific openness, introduce them to the human and social sciences approach, contribute to the development of their critical thinking, and prepare them for further schooling and higher education.

• Foster students' personal expression, enabling them to develop their imagination and assert their individual outlook, their subjectivity, within a group and as part of projects. Build students' self-confidence, their ability to say and do things with a critical and sensitive eye.

• Help students overcome certain barriers, notably psychological, cultural and spatial, that prevent them from projecting themselves into an imaginary world of academic and professional success, to enable them to build an ambitious career plan. Introduce them to careers and training related to foreign languages and cultures, as well as to the university environment and the expectations of higher education establishments.

On the ground, the Cordée de l'Inalco is structured around two poles, two axes: on the one hand, there are highlights at Inalco, where a variety of activities are offered (language discovery workshops, shows, discovering the university, meetings with students, etc.).), and on the other, cycles of themed workshops in small groups, organized throughout the year in partner establishments and complemented by cultural visits and encounters.

Highlights of meetings and get-togethers

• Opening days: these take place in October and January, and inaugurate a seven-week cycle of workshops (October to January or January to May). Students are welcomed to the Maison de la Recherche (Inalco's historic headquarters in the seventh arrondissement of Paris). The program includes a presentation of the school, its courses and career opportunities, a presentation of the cordée's activities, fun language workshops and a tour of the school's heritage building.

• Cordée welcome day: this takes place in January and brings together students from the LCM cordées in Île de France, Eure-et-Loir and Nouvelle Aquitaine. Students are welcomed at the Pôle des Langues et Civilisations in the 13th arrondissement and at a partner cultural establishment (Musée du Quai Branly, Institut du Monde Arabe, etc.). The program may include a tour of the establishment, introductory workshops in languages taught at Inalco, a visit to the library of languages and civilizations (BULAC), round-table discussions with students and alumni, and a guided tour of the partner cultural establishment.

• Closing day: this takes place in early June at the Pôle des Langues et Civilisations and brings together all the students in the LCM cordée. The program may include a series of workshops in the morning or a cultural visit, depending on the group, as well as - and above all - a festive program of cultural and leisure activities offered in the afternoon by the school's student associations and staff. The day is also an opportunity for students to share what they've done and discovered throughout the year: poster exhibitions, presentations of their various productions and oral presentations. At the end of the day, they will receive a certificate of participation in the LCM cordée.

Cycles of linguistic, reflective and creative workshops

Our pedagogical approach

• The La Cordées method and approach are inspired by so-called "non-formal" pedagogies and are embodied in a variety of proposals, where discovery and reflection are often accompanied by a sensitive, creative and personal approach. The wide variety of activities on offer have in common that they are designed to ensure that all students are set up for success: the idea is not to impart knowledge to students, but to enable them to make discoveries by themselves, to make them aware of their ability to learn and understand independently.

• The cycles offered as part of La Cordée, lasting around ten to twenty hours, enable students to explore unfamiliar languages and scripts, to practice the power of the verb, both written and spoken, to explore the intricacies of linguistics, or to conduct a small field survey. Here, as elsewhere, the emphasis is on decentralization and on linguistic and cultural spaces that are too often neglected in secondary education.

Language Decipherers" competition

A pedagogical linguistics team competition

• The "Déchiffreurs de Langues" competition is designed to enable students to discover language facts and linguistic systems that are unknown to them. Inspired by the Olympiad of Linguistics, the aim is to deduce linguistic facts, the functioning of a script, etc., by observing short corpora and using logic. It takes place in teams,

• The way in which the topics are designed (progressive difficulty of questions, clues to which students may or may not have recourse)gives it a pedagogical dimension: students should all be able to find a certain number of answers on their own, and be amazed at the discoveries they have made, drawing on their own powers of reflection and observation.

Æntrelangues" writing competition

A plurilingual creative writing competition

• In 2024-2025, as part of the Cordée "Langues et Cultures du Monde", Inalco will organize the first "Æntrelangues" competition, aimed at secondary school students. A multilingual writing competition to get students reading and listening to the diversity of languages that resonate around the world and thrill their classrooms, whether they be "original", "dialectal" or "dialectal". Whether they're "original", "dialectal" or "small", whether they're well known or literally imaginary...

• This plurilingual dimension is the main feature of this competition: the texts will be written in French, but blended, mixed, associated with other languages, in a thousand and one ways. This is hardly surprising, when you consider that Inalco, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales also known as "Langues'O", offers the study of over a hundred different languages and civilizations!

Discover university, research and careers

Meetings with students and alumnis

• Description to come.

Experimentarium program

• The Experimentarium program will enable roped-in students, both middle and high school, to meet Inalco PhD students. The aim, in terms of cultural openness and critical thinking, is both to raise students' awareness of what university research is all about, the production of scientific discourse and truth, and to awaken their interest in often little-known humanities disciplines.

  PhD students will undergo specific training to enable them to share their research topics in a fun and interactive way, and make science accessible and captivating for all. The workshops offered are thus designed to be engaging and dynamic, in order to arouse the interest and curiosity of students.

   

Orientation support actions

• Description coming soon

One-to-one mentoring

• Implemented in collaboration with AFEV (Association de la Fondation Étudiante pour la Ville), mentoring is "a support and learning program between a student volunteer and a young person experiencing difficulties in their educational path. Each week, the student volunteer devotes 2 hours of his or her time to support the young person in his or her learning path, restoring his or her confidence and desire to learn. Beyond homework, they work together on cultural openness, mobility, projection towards post-bac training, etc." (AFEV)

• In 2024-2025, mentoring will be offered at the Thomas Mann middle school, next door to Inalco. Around twenty Inalco students will provide mentoring throughout the year. Their volunteer commitment is recognized and valued as part of their university course (UE Engagement).

Partner establishments in 2024-2025

In 2024-2025, over 600 secondary school students from 22 schools in three académies (Ile-de-France, Nouvelle Aquitaine and Orléans-Tours) will take part in the Inalco-sponsored Cordée. Some forty students from the Cite éducative in Limay will also be taking part in an educational action program similar to that of La Cordée. Find here the interactive map with all our partner establishments for the year 2024-2025.

Organize workshops or training courses in partnership with Inalco

Are you a teacher or head of a school, college, university, etc., working in a cultural center, youth center, cultural institution, association or foundation? Have you heard about our pedagogical proposal and our approach, and would you like to request our intervention to intervene directly with your public or offer training to your teams?

We invite you to write to us, outlining your project, so that together we can build an action program that is as close as possible to your needs and wishes. As far as schools are concerned, we plan to register Inalco on the PassCulture scheme at the start of the 2024-2025 academic year. Our activities will then be bookable directly through the Adage platform.