Diane Gérin-Lajoie

The Role of the School in the Maintenance of French Language Minority Identity in English Canada

This paper presents a sociological analysis of the role played by the school in Francophone communities located outside of the province of Quebec, in Canada. Although education in French has always been tolerated in the country, it is only in 1982 that access to education in the minority language became a legal right, as specified in Article 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. The intent of my paper is to examine the role that teachers are expected to play as agents of linguistic and cultural reproduction in this minority context and, most importantly, how the teachers comprehend this role. The paper will present results obtained from a recently completed 3-year ethnographic study that I have conducted with 9 teachers, in order to examine their teaching experience the study was supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (2001-2004). The analysis will reveal a tension between their role as agents of knowledge transmission and agents of linguistic and cultural reproduction.

French Language Minority Education in Canada

There are almost one million (945,860) Canadians who have French as their mother tongue and who live outside of the province of Quebec. These Francophones live in minority settings relative to the numerically and politically dominant Anglophone majority. The largest number of Francophones outside of Quebec are concentrated in Ontario (484,265) and New-Brunswick (237,570). The rest live in the seven other provinces and territories of Canada (Bernard, 1990). The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982, recognizes in Section 23 the constitutional and legal rights of Francophones living outside of the province of Quebec to receive their instruction in French as a first language in institutions where French is the first language, as well as to manage their schools. How these rights are enacted at the provincial level varies across Canada (Corson & Lemay, 1996). It is in New Brunswick and Ontario that Francophone control over minority education is the greatest. While the Charter guaranteed the rights of Francophone minority communities to instruction in French, educational provisions for French language minority education existed before 1982 and were subject to ongoing developments in policy and practice. Both historically and in the present, education has constituted an important terrain for political struggle over minority rights.

L'innovation scolaire: deux expériences en milieu franco-ontarien

L’article qui suit examine la question de l’innovation scolaire et des facteurs qui vont en influencer le deroulement. Ce dernier varie, bien entendu, d’une innovation a l’autre, mais egalement d’une etape a l’autre a l’interieur d’un meme projet. Le processus par lequel un changement scolaire s’opere comporte en effet trois etapes qui sont la mobilisation, la mise en oeuvre et l’ institutionnalisation et chacune d’entre elles possedent ses propres caracteristiques. Le present article presente une analyse comparative de deux projets implantes dans des ecoles de langue francaise de l’Ontario, durant les annees de transition, soit en 7e, 8e et 9e annees. L’analyse comparative portera principalement sur les contextes particuliers dans lesquels se sont effectuees les etapes de mobilisation et de mise en oeuvre de ces projets et permettra ainsi de mieux comprendre le processus par lequel s’effectue toute tentative de changement dans le domaine scolaire.