Teachers, parents urge more inclusive history course for Quebec students
A group of teachers and parents has launched an online petition asking the Quebec government to come up with a new high school history curriculum that better reflects the contributions of indigenous peoples, anglophones and other ethnic minority groups.
“It is not acceptable that the recently implemented curriculum renders minority communities invisible, casts anglophones in the role of comic-book villain and fails to adequately address the (recommendations) by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” said Robert Green, chairperson of the Committee for the Enhancement of the History Curriculum in Quebec. The Quebec history course, taught in Grades 9 and 10 starting last September, has come under fire for not being inclusive enough.
The course was developed while the Parti Québécois was in power, and Green says it was influenced by a conservative nationalist group called the La Coalition pour l’histoire that had been lobbying for years for a more nationalistic perspective.
Some tweaks were made to the program after criticism from teachers last year, but Green said the changes didn’t go far enough in including other minority groups.
“If you do a search of the curriculum document with the words English or anglophone you will find, in almost every example, that word is embedded in a paragraph about conflict,” said Green, a teacher at Westmount High School.
He said the new history course seems to be “exclusively focused on the narrative of the Quebec nation and not Quebec society.”
The petition calls on the provincial government to have public consultations that would lead to a new inclusive history curriculum, accompanied by new textbooks and pedagogical resources for teachers. Learning about diverse viewpoints helps build social cohesion, Green said.
Here are some of the committee’s suggestions to make the curriculum more inclusive:
The curriculum should acknowledge the “complexity and diversity of Quebec society. The teaching of the sovereignist narrative should be taught as a perspective, like conservative or federalist perspectives, and not be the defining narrative throughout the course,” the committee says.
The curriculum needs to acknowledge “the diversity of Quebec’s anglophone community and its positive contributions to Quebec society. Students need to know the majority of Quebec anglophones were not elites living in the Golden Square Mile. Many were working-class Irish who suffered untold indignities at the hands of the British merchant class,” the committee says.
The course should reflect “the active role of indigenous people in shaping North American history in every historical period, rather than portraying them merely as hapless and passive victims of colonization.” Students need to learn more about residential schools, the committee says.
The course should “properly acknowledge the struggles and positive contributions of Quebec’s various ethnic minorities.” Students need to learn about slavery in Quebec, about the struggles against discrimination faced by Jewish, Italian and Greek immigrants and about Quebec’s efforts to welcome refugees. The committee says it is not calling for the “denationalization” of the history program, and agrees the program’s focus should be about the francophone majority. “To say that we want a program that is inclusive of ethnic minorities and indigenous communities does not mean that we want them to be given equal weight to the francophone majority,” the committee reiterated in a statement.
The Kativik School Board issued a news release saying the Quebec government is not doing enough to engage with aboriginal people to develop aboriginal content for the history course. The new curriculum offers too little aboriginal content and suppresses the Inuit voice, said Alicie Nalukturuk, the school board’s president.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has recorded the history of Indian residential schools in Canada, recommended “age-appropriate material on residential schools, treaties and aboriginal history” be made available to elementary and secondary school students across the country.