"We Lost the War of the Conquest": Narratives and Narrative Templates Among French Canadian Students

• In Event: 25.065 - Narratives, Counternarratives, and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Investigating Students, Teachers, and Texts

Abstract

Can different people from different regions tell the same narratives of the nation? How are these stories constructed? What role does schooling play in that story-telling process? In this paper, we address these questions in a large-scale study of young French Canadians’ understanding of the collective past. Drawing on the notion of historical consciousness we sought to investigate the relationship between students’ narratives/narrative structures and the forces that contribute to the transmission of a collective memory in a divided society. Our goal was to study the role of school history–and other ‘historicizing forces’–on the shaping of people’s historical consciousness

Authors

• Stephane Levesque, University of Ottawa

• Jocelyn Létourneau, Laval University