Québec’s Non-Confessional Ethics and Religious Culture Curriculum in Catholic Denominational Schools: Reflections by Secondary School Teachers

Abstract

Pursuing the goal of integrating the cultural and religious diversity of Quebec, the nondenominational Ethics and Religious Culture program is compulsory since 2008 in all Quebec schools. To achieve this objective, teachers are required to adopt a professional stance of impartiality to avoid influencing the development of students' viewpoints and promote harmonious coexistence. This article comparatively analyzes reflections by teachers from private Catholic schools and nondenominational public school on their professional stance of impartiality. Contrary to our speculations, the implementation of the professional stance of impartiality does not seem to have any connection with the confessional character of schools.

Keywords:

• Ethics and Religious Culture program
• teachers’ professional stance
• private Catholic denominational schools

Notes

Notes

1 The professional stance of the ERC program created some problems for teachers during the implementation of the program. In this website, the MELS presented answers to the teachers’ questions. This section of the official ERC program website was reserved for teachers. It is important to note that this information was only available during the first year of implementation of the program, and is no longer accessible. Despite this fact, we chose to integrate the information into our contextualization of the case because it contains clarifications that are crucial for our research.