Navigating Mandated Neutrality and the Impact on Teacher Identity: An Analysis of the Ethics and Religious Culture Program in Québec

The author explores how eight teachers of the Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) program in Quebec secondary schools navigated their personal and professional identities, especially when confronted with institutional (i.e. government and/or school board) policies. Specifically, the author probes the question of how teachers generally understand and apply the requirement of neutrality in their professional conduct, as dictated by the ERC Program. In 2008, the mandatory ERC Program replaced courses such as Catholic and Moral Religious Instruction, Protestant Moral Religious Instruction, and the Moral Religious Education instruction. The author further notes that given the changes to religious education within government schools over the course of the last six decades, with a diversifying population and a push towards secularization, the ERC Program required a certain professional conduct from teachers, specifically, the need for teachers to remain neutral state agents in the classroom. In the author’s qualitative and ethnographic study with the eight ERC teachers, she explores the complexities of neutrality in practice, placing value on the voices and experiences of teachers. The author contends that the use of the theoretical framework she employed, in tandem with the methodologies she used, reveals greater insight not only into the practicality of neutrality, but the interrelated challenges of the ERC Program as a whole. From her exploration, four themes of inquiry emerge, which she analyzes: 1.) Experience and Pedagogy; 2.) Struggles in Being Authentic; 3.) Applications of Neutrality and 4.) Negotiating Spaces. The author explains that these four overarching themes of inquiry allow for greater insight into the potentials and challenges of the ERC Program, as voiced by practitioners. The author concludes that these themes are extrapolated from the teachers’ lived experiences in the classroom, as well as their personal worldviews. The combination of these experiences and worldviews discloses how some teachers resist or adapt to the goals and competencies of the program, and the requirements on their professional conduct. (In 2020, the Ministère de l’Éducation decided to replace the ERC program with a new controversial program titled Culture and Citizenship in Québec, to be based on three main areas, namely culture, citizenship in Quebec and dialogue and critical thinking.)

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

2017

207p.

en