TOWARDS A PEDAGOGY OF ENDOGENOUS MEDIATION IN WEST AFRICAN ORAL LITERATURE

The persistent difficulties facing formal schooling in West Africa can be examined in relation to the discontinuity between learners’ sociocultural environments and educational institutions shaped by colonial models. This article proposes a framework for integrating locally rooted oral literature, including tales, epics, and proverbs, into teaching. It combines the analysis of reported speech with perspectives on situated and distributed cognition. Through a qualitative textual analysis of Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s trickster tale Petit Bodiel, the study explores how narrative polyphony, direct and indirect speech, and strategic intelligence (metis) may support cognitive scaffolding, critical inquiry, and learners’ sociolinguistic agency. It then translates this interpretative framework into a pedagogical planning matrix and two proposed lesson plans. These applications are theoretical proposals whose effects on learning remain to be assessed through classroom research.