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.

History Teaching and Narrative Tools

“…Despite this distinction, I believe Wertsch's three notions are still useful for reading the workings of English-speaking students' historical consciousness in Quebec, where the ambiguity of Anglophones' group status and the fragility of Francophones as a dominant majority still point to a heightened maintenance of group boundaries and the potential for tense intergroup relations resulting from ongoing language and identity politics. Although history teachers are permitted to bring English-speakers' experiences into their teaching if they so decide to, which would not necessarily have been the case regarding minority group narratives in Soviet Estonia, Anglophone youth are still faced with having to negotiate their place and role in society as members of a historical community that continues to be stigmatized by an on-going nationalist discourse that is very present in the national history program and in larger Quebec society (Maclure, 2003;Létourneau, 2006;Mc Andrew, 2010;Zanazanian, 2008Zanazanian, , 2012). Wertsch's three notions should thus simply be seen as comprising interpretive filters for reading data that may otherwise be very complex and hard to access, the analysis of which need to nonetheless be examined with care in order to not reinforce stereotypes or to misinform readers concerned with Anglo-Quebec vitality and the teaching of national history.…”

“…To be relevant to students' lives for fostering group coherency and functionality, the availability of such structured English-speaking Quebec narratives would have to ideally configure both the content and epistemological knowledge underlying the community's diverse historical adventures and contributions to the province. It would have to be ones that Anglophone youth could readily draw upon and mobilize for cultivating a sense of common belonging to Quebec as a welcomed and embraced community, and ones that their French-speaking counterparts could come to recognize and employ for accepting English-speakers as important and respected Quebec citizens, and not as a threat to their group's security and regeneration (Maclure, 2003;Létourneau & Moisan, 2004;Zanazanian, 2012;Létourneau, 2014).…”

“…Historical consciousness in this study refers to an individual's capacity to mobilize notions of the past-both its narrative configurations and the interpretive filters used to make sense of the past-for making necessary moral decisions to orient oneself in a social relationship (Rüsen, 2005;Zanazanian, 2012). When faced with ethical, political, or practical issues of an historical nature, individuals consult past ideas, events, and experiences for giving meaning to what once was and for establishing what could have been, should, and shall be.…”

Developing Historical Consciousness and a Community of History Practitioners: A Survey of Prospective History Teachers Across Canada

“…For Jörn Rüsen (2005), this consciousness makes it possible for individuals to understand and orient their life in reference to the course of time, and to establish relevant links between the past, the present, and the envisioned future in the form of a usable past -or what Jean-Pierre Charland (2003) called "knowledge mobilization for action" (p. 21). Following this logic, aspects of prospective teachers' historical consciousness emerge when their own positionality is "confronted" in actual situations that require referral to the past and the use of relevant interpretive filters for justifying and mobilizing their sense of agency -which history teaching, in and of itself a fundamentally political, ethical, and practical endeavour, permits one to do (Zanazanian, 2012(Zanazanian, , 2015.…”

“…Looking at prospective teachers' historical consciousness, or what we might conceive as their capacity to give meaning to the past for making sense of and acting in present-day reality (Rüsen 2005;Zanazanian 2012Zanazanian , 2015, serves one key way of elucidating the many understandings of history's operations and its concomitant teaching activities that they are most inclined to espousing once in the field. The underlying logic of historical consciousness is based on the principle that every person embodies -consciously or not -some beliefs, assumptions, and visions about the past that are used to make guiding decisions in life (Conrad et al, 2013).…”