The Culture and Citizenship in Québec (CCQ) program is a perfect opportunity to prepare students to exercise citizenship in Quebec through the development of critical thinking and dialogue. As a teacher, you play a crucial role in this endeavour, and it is important to be prepared. By the end of this article, you should have all the information you need to start lesson planning!
A natural place to begin is by reading through the program’s curriculum, progression of learning, and framework for evaluation.
Remember that CCQ has three main objectives:
These are to be achieved by developing students’ critical thinking and dialogue skills through the tenets of sociology and ethical philosophy.
If you want to delve deeper into the program, here are several dedicated resources you may find useful:
Ideally, we recommend structuring your lesson plans around the orientations of the general themes and themed content specific to the grade you teach. These will give you a good sense of your teaching goals.
Once you have read over this information, focus on the compulsory content and integrate it progressively into your lessons throughout the year.
Another important thing to keep in mind, both at the lesson planning stage and during the year, is the development of the program competency in your students. The competency becomes more complex with each cycle, such that by the end of elementary school, students are able to understand Quebec’s cultural realities and think critically about the questions these may raise.
Ultimately, the knowledge acquired in elementary school serves as the basis for developing the high school competencies, which are linked to either sociology or ethics.
Progression of CCQ competencies from elementary to high school (MEQ, 2023)
The CCQ program includes sexuality education, which should be treated like any other component of the curriculum and tied into the program competency. You can always turn to other members of your school team if needed; the official program notes that sexuality education in schools is a responsibility shared by all school staff.
The CCQ program is taught through the lenses of sociology and ethics. In elementary school, these approaches are not formally distinguished, but you may find it useful as a teacher to understand the basics of the two disciplines.
The aim of the sociological approach is for students to observe their environment (which gets broader with each cycle of elementary school) and analyze cultural realities while reflecting on the relationships between individuals and groups. This is accomplished by introducing students to the scientific process of observing, evaluating the relevance of collected data, comparing observations, and so on. Among other things, this approach is intended to develop critical thinking skills.
Meanwhile, the ethical philosophy approach seeks to use dialogue and reflection to understand different perspectives. As a teacher, you should be concerned not with giving students the “right answers,” but rather with presenting a variety of viewpoints for them to consider and giving them the tools they need to evaluate multiple factors and possibilities.
The classroom should become a place where values, norms, rules, experiences, and feelings intermingle, and where disagreements can arise. This makes it an experiment in community life, with students under the supervision of an adult who encourages nuanced exchanges and mutual respect.
At the same time, not all opinions are created equal. It is your responsibility to intervene if someone’s comments go against the values of democratic society in Quebec, such as by violating the principles of the provincial Charter of human rights and freedoms.
The stance you take in front of your students is of the utmost importance. Cultural realities are complex and must be approached with care. You should therefore aim to do the following:
It is also essential to protect your students’ privacy. They are not required to share their emotions or any other aspects of their private lives (sexual orientation, political opinions, etc.), nor are they to be evaluated in this respect.
When you are creating lesson material, it is always nice to have resources you can use as a starting point instead of being confronted with a blank page. To give you some inspiration, here are a few activities, articles, and concept sheets that can be found on the Alloprof website:
In addition to the resources mentioned in the first section of this article, which are specific to the CCQ program, we encourage you to check out the videos on the French-language platform Télé-Québec en classe, along with this list of tools and resources (primarily in French only) from Agence Science-Presse.