Organisation et re-production des rapports de domination dans les distributions dissymétriques du travail enseignant : une enquête du point de vue d’enseignant·es de groupes racisés

In less than a decade, the professional integration of immigrant teachers has generated a large body of research in Quebec. In general, these studies use interpretive frameworks that rely on an analysis of cultural gaps between immigrant teachers and the host society. Despite measures put in place in 2001 to mitigate the effects of systemic discrimination in employment in public bodies, there is no research linking the experience of these teachers to the persistent under-representation of racialized teachers in Quebec or, even more notably, in the French-language school boards of the Montreal Metropolitan Region (MMR) (Quebec Human Rights Commission, 2015).  Based on a critical/interpretative epistemological perspective and a framework of feminist analysis, this dissertation moves away from this essentializing prism in order to produce new knowledge aimed at increasing social justice within educational institutions. The feminist perspectives guiding the thesis have in common their desire to expose the configurations of social and power relations through which domination in the various spheres of society is materialized, including in the workplace. Inspired by the sociological method of institutional ethnography, this study takes the form of an enquiry seeking to understand how social relations, especially of race, are organized and (re)produced in the asymmetrical distributions of teaching work. The study was conducted from the point of view of vocational integration teachers who were assigned by racial social relations and were working in French-language school boards in the Montreal MRR (14). Their stories and questions led to an exploration of the institutional and practical processes regulating the obtention of a teaching licence and employment contracts. The study was expanded through interviews with principals of educational institutions (4), educational consultants (2), union representatives (2) and employees in the human resources sector (2) within two school boards of the MMR. Documents that codify these processes in different ways – laws, regulations, reports, collective agreements, etc. – have also been analyzed.  The thesis conclusions explore several aspects. The exposure of the configurations of social relations in teaching work cannot be done without more widely exposing the multiple hierarchies structuring this work and even its legislative framework. From various fragments of materials, the thesis reveals empirically how the increase of atypical and precarious work in teaching – which has become more pronounced since the 1990s – induced an increase in the possibilities of hierarchization among employees, from which arose a reconfiguration of the division of labour. The thesis shows how racial social relations organize the distribution of work in a profession already historically structured according to gender social relations. The results highlight the creation of hierarchical "classes" of teachers in order to fill assignments, which are themselves classified according to whether or not they make career advancement possible. In the absence of effective measures to counter systemic discrimination, this thesis shows how the arbitrary nature of the processes and the criteria by which teachers are selected run the risk of disproportionately confining teachers from racialized groups to atypical and precarious jobs. In light of these results, the thesis calls on educational leaders to intervene at several levels of educational institutions to confront inequalities in treatment that effectively compromise equality rights among teaching staff.

Keyphrases: Domination, Teaching work, Division of labor, Social relations, Racist ideology, Systemic discrimination, Institutional ethnography, Ruling relations