Navigating mandated neutrality and the impact on teacher identity: an analysis of the ethics and religious culture program in Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This inquiry explores how Ethics and Religious Culture teachers in Quebec navigate their personal and professional identities, especially when confronted with institutional policies. Specifically, the question of how teachers understand and apply the requirement of neutrality in their professional conduct is interrogated in this thesis. The history of the educational climate in Quebec reveals a connection to the Catholic Church that dates back to 1867. With the increasing rise of secularism in the 1960s, the political and educational climate began to move towards a separation of Church and State. Over time these demands introduced new changes into the educational system, such as the replacement of the Catholic and Protestant school boards with linguistic school boards. In 2008, the mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) Program replaced courses such as Catholic and Moral Religious Instruction, Protestant Moral Religious Instruction and the Moral Religious Education instruction. Given the changes to religious education within government schools over the course of the last six decades, with a diversifying population and a push towards secularization, the ERC Program required a certain professional conduct from teachers, specifically, the need for teachers to remain neutral state agents in the classroom.In this qualitative and ethnographic study with eight ERC teachers, I explore the complexities of neutrality in practice, placing value on the voices and experiences of teachers. The use of the theoretical framework I employ, in tandem with the methodologies described in this thesis, reveals greater insight not only into the practicality of neutrality, but the interrelated challenges of the ERC Program as a whole. From this exploration, four themes of inquiry emerge, which I analyze in this research study; 1.) Experience and Pedagogy; 2.) Struggles in Being Authentic; 3.) Applications of Neutrality and 4.) Negotiating Spaces. These four overarching themes of inquiry allow for greater insight into the potentials and challenges of the ERC Program, as voiced by practitioners. These themes are extrapolated from the teachers' lived experiences in the classroom, as well as their personal worldviews. The combination of these experiences and worldviews disclose how some teachers resist or adapt to the goals and competencies of the program, and the requirements on their professional conduct. Their voices and suggestions contribute to future pedagogical and policy implications of the ERC Program. They also provide the reader with a case study of the intersection between teacher identity and mandated government and/or school board policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".