The robinsonnade: a "pre-text" for reading and writing about nature in elementary school

Author(s)

  • Kathy Similowski CY Cergy Paris University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief19405

Keywords:

youth literature, primary education, reading, writing, environmental education, children's literature

Abstract

Literature not only contributes to the formation of a literary culture, but also to the construction of the reader’s personality and the expression of his or her sensibility.  While nature has always been strongly represented in children’s books, ecological concerns are now finding their way into the most recent works aimed at this readership. The robinsonnade genre, born of countless rewritings of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, is undoubtedly the literary genre that offers the most direct way of seeing and thinking about nature. This contribution explores the robinsonnades and their power to evoke the living. Works are read in class by pupils at the end of elementary school in order to produce texts. The aim is to describe nature, but also to initiate reflection on the relationship between human beings and their environment.

 

Author Biography

  • Kathy Similowski, CY Cergy Paris University

    Kathy Similowski is a lecturer in language sciences at the INSPÉ de l'académie de Versailles, CY Cergy Paris Université, where she teaches in the master’s programmes Métiers de l'enseignement, de l'éducation et de la formation, 1er degré (MEEF1); Formation aux métiers du livre et de la lecture pour jeunes publics (MEEF4). She defended a thesis at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2017 under the supervision of S. Plane. Her research focuses on writing and literature in primary schools.

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Published

2024-07-15

Issue

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2024): At the School of Life: teaching literature with environmental humanities

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Kathy Similowski

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

“The robinsonnade: a ‘pre-text’ for reading and writing about nature in elementary school” (2024) Relief - Revue Électronique de Littérature Francaise, 18(1), pp. 112–130. doi:10.51777/relief19405.