L'histoire à l'école, matière à débats... : analyse des sources de controverses entourant les réformes de programmes d'histoire du Québec au secondaire (1961-2013)

Starting from the 2006 controversy about the "History and Citizenship Education" program in Quebec's high schools, the author focuses on the government's aims and on issues associated with teaching the history in the province. Specifically, the author examines the sources of the controversies surrounding the government's reforms of Quebec's high school history programs from the creation of the Parent Commission (1961) until the creation of the Beauchemin-Fahmy-Eid Committee (2013). He focuses on three main steps: consultation, program development, and feedback and/or evaluation. The author's analysis is based on eighteen interviews with key stakeholders, public and private records, public consultation briefs, government documents and newspaper articles. To analyze this corpus, he applied a model to identify the main issues at the heart of the 2006 controversy, each at the center of a confrontation between two global or sectoral standards. This model, he points out, as well as analytical frameworks for observing the political game surrounding program development, falls within the field of cognitive and neo-institutionalist approaches to educational policy analysis. The author argues that his results suggest that while some of the controversies surrounding the reforms of Quebec's high school history programs are caused by a gap between the standards required by stakeholders in this field and the repositories that underlie official documents, some derive from more organizational, structural, professional and material problems, such as the compulsory nature of the program or the number of hours devoted to its teaching.

PhD dissertation

Université Laval

Québec

2018

xv-383p.

fr