Jean Dard (June 21, 1789 — October 1, 1833) was a French teacher in Saint-Louis, Senegal who, in 1817, opened the first French-language school in Africa. He also compiled the first French-Wolof dictionary and grammar (1846).
Dard developed a new approach for teaching French as a foreign language, the "mutual method" or méthode de traduction (translation method), based on a learning approach pioneered by Aloïsius Édouard Camille Gaultier, by which children were taught to read and write in their native Wolof and then learned French by translating. According to Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, Dard's method was "very modern and very effective, and Dard was said to have achieved remarkable results with it."
In Senegal, Dard took a signare with whom he had a son. He then returned to France for reasons of health and married Charlotte-Adélaïde Picard—an eyewitness of the wreck of the Méduse—with whom he had three additional children. Dard served as a teacher and the town secretary in Bligny-lès-Beaune. The Dards returned to Senegal in 1832; however, he died there a year later.
References
- Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, The Story of French (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006), 199-200.
- Nadeau and Barlow, 200.
- "Décès de Charlotte-Adélaïde Dard, rescapée de La Méduse" (in French). Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon.
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