Transformations et recontextualisations du discours pédagogique : une comparaison des politiques curriculaires en France et au Québec (2000-2015)

This thesis examines contemporary curricular policies at lower secondary school level in a comparative perspective. Over the past fifteen years, many OECD countries have introduced significant reforms to overhaul their secondary school curricula (education programmes, pedagogical approaches and assessment practices). Looking at worldwide patterns, it could be argued that much of the formal content of these curricula have become standardized and that we can observe the diffusion of a “global curriculum” (Meyer, 2007). However, empirical research analyzing these reforms from a comparative perspective is still scarce, and little is known about how these common trends are translated into national contexts. In order to enhance our understanding of contemporary curricular transformations, we carried out a comparative analysis in two francophone contexts: France and the province of Quebec (Canada). Taking a comprehensive and non-normative approach, our research explores common dynamics as well as distinctive features of curricular reforms in these two policy settings.  Drawing on the analytical categories developed by Basil Bernstein (1990, 2000), we first examined the evolution of the official pedagogic discourse since the early 2000s, insofar as these changes have materialized in official texts. Secondly, we explored the way in which this discourse circulates from the central to the local level, looking at the practices of intermediary agents – inspectors and pedagogical counsellors – in charge of recontextualizing, interpreting and translating the official discourse. This thesis is situated at the intersection of the sociology of the curriculum and the sociology of public action. It rests on an international comparison between two contrasting cases. The qualitative methodology consists of a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, a content analysis of the formal curriculum at lower secondary level in France and in Quebec (legislative and regulatory texts and guidelines and support documentation, N = 47); on the other hand, an analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with inspectors and pedagogical counsellors (N = 18), as well as managers in educational services (N = 6) in one académie in France and two school boards in Quebec.  Our findings highlight the complex hybridization of pedagogic models at work in French and Quebecois curricular policies, and illustrates different declinations of the “global curriculum” once transposed into each of these two settings. Far from resulting in a standardization of national curricula, our two cases illustrate how common orientations (e.g. the loss of legitimacy of disciplinary logics, the individualization of pedagogic relations) are recontextualized according to logics and dynamics specific to each educational system. Long-term historical factors (including curricular traditions), existing institutional arrangements (such as curriculum-making processes), and circumstantial factors related to the political context constitute powerful filters that maintain strong national specificities in terms of curricular evolutions and policy trajectories. Finally, by examining the circulation of official texts between the central and local levels, we identified two modes of recontextualization of the official discourse (distanciation vs. reproduction) characterizing agents in each educational context. This allows us to question the importance of "mediations" and the role of the intermediate level in policy implementation.

Keyphrases: France, education policy, secondary education reforms, sociology of the curriculum, intermediary agents, international comparison