Date of Birth: 
About Jean Dard
- 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 by 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—by whom he had three additional children.
- Dard served as a teacher and town secretary in Bligny-lès-Beaune.
- The Dards returned to Senegal in 1832, but he died there a year later.
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