Curriculum recommendations about national history teaching in Quebec: a lexicometrical analysis

This article presents the results of a lexicometrical content analysis carried out on a corpus of texts drawn from the Work Group on History Teaching (1996), the Work Group on Curriculum Reform (1997) and the Committee of Experts responsible for studying the question of strengthening history in secondary school (2014). These reports recommended changes in history teaching for the last twenty years, underpinning the writing of Quebec's history curriculums. This analysis aims to identify convergent and divergent orientations across the data to assess their consistency. On one hand, the results demonstrate the presence of a core discourse about the importance of reform in education. On the other hand, these results show strong discourse specificity across the data, particularly acute for the Committee of Experts responsible for studying the question of strengthening history in secondary school (2014) striving for a nationalist approach.