History Teaching in an Intercultural Context : Implications for Citizenship

The author points out that Quebec's model of cultural diversity, known as "Interculturalism," has been the object of considerable debate since Bouchard and Taylor released in 2008 their report, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Among other things, the author notes, Bouchard and Taylor recommended that schools take more seriously Quebec's Intercultural model as a means of integrating diverse cultures into a single society. The author considers the uptake and implication of Intercultural ideals in Quebec's "History and Citizenship" education course. Her study involved three secondary school history teachers in Montreal Anglophone schools. She combined curriculum documents, classroom observations, open-ended interviews, and photo-voice methods to illuminate the Intercultural model's shortcomings with regard to issues of power and identity. The guiding question for this dissertation is: how do the historicized power dynamics embedded within Quebec's Intercultural policy shape history education in Quebec? The author argues that two sets of tensions are found to be at the crux of the issue of history teaching in Quebec: first the theoretical debates on history education do not take Quebec's specific brand of cultural negotiation into account, resulting in a lack of research on the civic implications of history education particular to the Quebec context. Second, the Intercultural model itself does not adequately deal with entrenched issues of power relating to marginalized identities, which raises many questions for how civic education is being carried out in the province.

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

2014

232p.

en