Théorie et pratique didactiques : création d'un plan de cours interdisciplinaire de littérature et musique comparées au collégial

At the collegial level, literature professors face the challenge of competence and culture’s complementarily. This project is designed to foster cultural development through the teaching of comparative literature and music based on a problem-solving approach. However, there is no theory of instruction that lends itself to the establishment of such interdisciplinary course material. This research-development intends to develop a didactics theory appropriate to such an approach through a theoretical component and a practical one.   To address the purpose of the research, the second chapter presents the theoretical component, which establishes a theory for teaching comparative literature and music through a conceptual analysis (Van der Maren, 2004). In this section, a reference document composed of three parts is developed. The first is epistemological and emphasizes certain issues regarding interdisciplinarity. Didactic in nature, the second deals with the parameters of the processes of transformation and of transpositions applied to knowledge in the context of interdisciplinary education. The third and final part is based on the two that precede it, suggesting points where elements of interdisciplinary content intersect to link literature and music.   The third chapter then describes the practical component in detail in order to develop the research product. Building on the developments of the reference document, this section presents the three product specification documents: the knowledge specifications, the pedagogical specifications and the media specifications, according to a research-development methodology proposed Loiselle et Harvey (2009). These documents lead to the concrete realization of the research product: a sample outline for a comparative literature and music course. This outline is divided into three phases: 1) a presentation of general content regarding literature and music to differentiate the two arts, 2) an exploration of interdisciplinary links from sounds, vowels and consonants to the space and temporality of the story, and 3) a written work that requires students to delve into a final comparative literature and music assignment based on concrete and complete literary works. Completing this methodological chapter is an examination of the conditions related to the evaluation of this research-development by a panel of third-party expert respondents for the purpose of discussing the results obtained. This panel of experts includes a university professor, a college-level researcher and an educational consultant at the college level.    According to the experts’ assessment, this research-development exhibits a high degree of relevance and innovation from a theoretical perspective. It addresses the lack of an interdisciplinary theory of instruction in comparative literature and music. Moreover, from the practical perspective, the sample outline has proved to be functional, consultable, adaptable and transferable, and it may be used as an example for any institutional course outline template or for teaching sequences aimed at interdisciplinary cultural development.

Keyphrases: culture, Didactics, interdisciplinarity, epistemology, comparative literature and music, course outline