Historical Consciousness and the Structuring of Group Boundaries: A Look at Two Francophone School History Teachers Regarding Quebec’s Anglophone Minority

Abstract

This article looks at the impact of historical consciousness on the structuring of group boundaries among national history teachers within Quebec’s context of group duality between Francophones and Anglophones. By using an “open‐ended interpretation key” for taking into account how teachers interact with temporal change for negotiating their ethno‐cultural agency toward the Other, this article specifically focuses on the different understandings that two teachers of the Franco‐Québécois majority develop from the past for knowing and engaging with the Anglo‐Québécois. By grasping whether they recognize the latter’s moral and historical agency in time, the degree of both educators’ sensitivity to Anglophone social realities and historical experiences become clear, as do their willingness to transmit such information to their students. On the whole, despite demonstrating a more or less equal capacity to develop plausible‐like understandings of the past, both teachers offer two diverging attitudes for dealing with the Other, which ultimately reflect two main opposing social discourses over how to properly confront memories of the “French–English Conflict.” Given the potential burden of these debates on how teachers (and students) historicize inter‐group realities, the article ends with proposing a means of teaching history that fosters the development of autonomous and conscientious engagements with the past. Not only does this approach entail respecting differences in opinions and choices, but also highlights the potentials of embracing change for improving the quality of common future life.

Notes

Notes

1 In this article, Francophone and Franco‐Québécois refer to Québécois of French‐Canadian descent, whereas Anglophone and Anglo‐Québécois denote those of British heritage or others assimilated by the latter.

2 Emerging at the conjunction of group interaction, the “Other” in general constructivist understandings of ethnicity simply refers to an opposing group that serves to distinguish and validate the “We” from the latter—thereby necessarily implying a clash of interests and an ensuing power struggle (Barth, 1996; Juteau, 1999). In this article, the “significant Other” particularly refers to that out‐group with which the “We” has unequally shared power structures through sustained contact over a long period of time within a given society (Schermerhorn, 1978).

3 Such moral decision making should be seen as an implicit process when historicizing the past. For my purposes here, choosing between “right” and “wrong” is automatic and instinctive, and it does not necessarily follow a logically clear and precise pattern.

4 Fundamentally speaking, these attributes not only include narrative configurations of the past, but also interpretive filters used to make sense of the latter.

5 My “open‐ended interpretation key” is a reading guide for both locating respondents’ tendencies of “ethno‐cultural” agency toward the significant Other and better understanding and qualifying their verbal expressions when the historicizing the past for making sense of the latter. As a start list of preliminary categories that emerged from the study’s theoretical understandings of historical consciousness, it served to grasp respondents’ verbal expressions, while also developing new categories of analysis along the way. My “interpretation key” was specifically “open” because it permitted to actively engage in a dialogue with the data and to comprehend nuances in respondents’ expressions and to create new understandings of the workings of their historical consciousness. As such, I expanded on theoretical notions of historical consciousness by examining connections between categorized and described verbal expressions (Dey, 1993; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Hyde, 2000; Mason, 2002).

6 Conceived as a sort of empirical measuring stick, an ideal‐type is a purely mental construct that logically and coherently synthesizes, in an accentuated and homogenized manner, the critical elements that form the perfect or absolute “idea” of a particular reality for purposes of analyzing and better understanding meanings given to that reality in concrete life. Of importance, Weber emphasizes that an ideal‐type “has no connection at all with value‐judgments, and it has nothing to do with any type of perfection other than a purely logical one” (Weber, 1949, pp. 98–99). In this sense, I understand an ideal‐type as representing ideational as opposed to ideal reality. The former refers to the world of perfect “concepts” or “ideas” that I find distances itself from connotations of “desirable attainment” or “ethical behavior” that can be found in the use of the term ideal.

7 To contextualize the problem, I presented respondents with a contentious issue that had provoked public debate during Quebec’s recent History Wars in 2006. I focused on the alleged decrease of Franco‐Québécois realities and experiences in the new History and Citizenship Education program, which was perceived by certain members of the public as accommodating cultural diversity while belittling the power of the majority to properly integrate the latter into the mores of Quebec (Bulletin d'Histoire Politique, 2007). Seixas and Clark’s (2004) study on the workings of students’ historical consciousness regarding a controversial historical issue under considerable media attention in British Columbia inspired this strategy.

8 The idea for developing such an open‐ended narrative was borrowed from Létourneau and Moisan (2004), who conducted a qualitative study that sought to better understand the complexity of the knowledge of the historical experiences that young Franco‐Québécois students of French‐Canadian descent hold of their own community in Quebec.

9 The definition of this configuration was borrowed from Létourneau and Moisan (2004), whose aforementioned study found that the great majority of their respondents transmitted a particular understanding of their group’s historical experience, one that could be qualified as “a vision of an abandoned and reclusive people, abused by the Other and always hesitating to take control” (p. 348, my translation from French to English).

10 With the objectives of developing students’ identities, their adherence to civic values, and their appreciation of the historical method, the 1982 “History of Quebec and Canada” focused on three main periods of the province’s past: The French Regime, British Rule, and the Contemporary Period. For teaching the course, educators had some latitude in choosing among the following instructional approaches: transmitting historical content, the historical method, the development of students’ personalities and identities, or teaching to improve human relations and society (Ministère de l'Éducation du Québec, 1983). Due to a mandatory end‐of‐year exam in June and to general unfamiliarity with disciplinary history, teachers however largely transmitted historical content, which amounted to transmitting the collective identity of the Franco‐Québécois and sidestepping Anglo‐Québécois realities and experiences (Ministère de l'Éducation du Québec, 1996).

11 I have translated all the following quotes into English myself, and in so doing, I have done my best to truly express what was meant in the original. In some instances, I have inserted parts of the original French within the translation so as to offer an exact meaning.