Bridging Two Research Solitudes: Language, Culture, and Curriculum Within the Canadian Journal of Education

• In Event: Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS): Provoking Educational Research Across Canada: Knowledge, Dissemination, and the Public Good

Abstract

Canada, a country founded by both the French and the British (at least in a binary imaginary where the indigenous population was conveniently absent from the landscape) and then conquered by the latter in 1760 led to what has commonly been called the Two Solitudes. The term “solitude”, although many will say is no longer representative of the French-English reality in Canada, has served to describe the physical, philosophical, cultural and linguistic differences and borders which have historically kept the two groups apart and at odds with each other. Regardless of any present-day attempts to blur such boundaries between the two, it must be acknowledged that many times Francophone and Anglophone historical narratives have developed along quite different lines. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the schooling systems which evolved to serve either the minority French or the majority English populations. Schools in French schooling systems (especially those in Québec, the one province in Canada to have French as it’s only official language), tend to have been modeled along French European motifs while their unilingual English counterparts, lived more of an American influence. Such parallel pathways have necessarily led to “different social realities, historical experiences, narratives” (Zanazanian, 2008, p. 109) and discourses coming to ground each system. Growing out of these divergent models, are Canadian Teacher Education Programs and the type of research agendas that are promoted by each. The influence of parallel pathways becomes obvious when one considers the different ways in which French and English scholars have come to signify various educational concepts differently. Terms such as “curriculum”, “pedagogy” and even “care” tend to be used and interpreted in vastly different ways depending on the language the author is writing in. For example, in French, the word “curriculum” tends to signify the official government document as in ‘The curriculum’ attached to a specific program of studies while in English, “curriculum” has often come to mean education in its very broadest, political, social, and philosophical sense (Egan, 2003). Aside from terminology, the impactful methodological paradigm shift which began in the late 1970s (see for instance Denzin & Lincoln, 2011) and spread across the English Canadian and American research landscapes, is, still today, barely evident in French Canadian and Québécois educational scholarship. Such paradigmatic divides have made it more likely that French scholars will read and publish in unilingual French journals while English scholars will publish in either bilingual or English-only journals. In Canada there are few actual “bilingual” journals, and of these, the Canadian Journal of Education (CJE) is the only one to draw a substantial amount of scholarship written in French. As a bilingual (French-English) Canadian scholar who works as one of the editors of this journal, I will discuss the challenges entailed in trying to publish a journal which is coherent in its overall mission and yet open to competing or divergent conceptual, theoretical or methodological frames and discourses.

Author

• Rochelle Marie Skogen, University of Alberta