The Role of the School in the Maintenance of French Language Minority Identity in English Canada

This paper presents a sociological analysis of the role played by the school in Francophone communities located outside of the province of Quebec, in Canada. Although education in French has always been tolerated in the country, it is only in 1982 that access to education in the minority language became a legal right, as specified in Article 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. The intent of my paper is to examine the role that teachers are expected to play as agents of linguistic and cultural reproduction in this minority context and, most importantly, how the teachers comprehend this role. The paper will present results obtained from a recently completed 3-year ethnographic study that I have conducted with 9 teachers, in order to examine their teaching experience the study was supported by the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (2001-2004). The analysis will reveal a tension between their role as agents of knowledge transmission and agents of linguistic and cultural reproduction.