Resumen de Studentship: beyond normative conceptions of civic education in Québec's ERC program
In the last 150 years in Québec, religious and moral education shifted from being the foundation of the public school system in the shape of the Protestant and Catholic confessional school boards to being taught strictly within the confines of the government-mandated Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) program in 2008. The ground-breaking ERC program currently serves as the sole curriculum for teaching values, respect, conscience and tolerance to all religions from a secular position (Bouchard, 2009; Boudreau, 2011; Morris, 2011; Zaver and DeMartini, 2016). In this discussion paper, we introduce the term “studentship”, an educational concept that encompasses the ethical values a student should learn and put into practice in an educational setting. We argue for the need of its inclusion in the ERC since merely framing discussions of ethics within the citizenship framework limits the ability of students to fully situate and embody ethical and moral values.
