How knowing more about interest groups can advance our understanding of education policies: The case of the Quebec association of history teachers
This article examines the potential of analyzing interest groups as a way to better understand and analyze education policies. We take as a starting point an article by Prud’homme (2007) devoted to the 2006 controversy surrounding the history and citizenship education program of Quebec’s upper secondary education. In the article, Prud’homme advances and demonstrates that this controversy was born of a redistribution of power among history teachers, historians as well as groups and specialists from education sciences (such as educationalists and psychopedagogues) surrounding the development of history programs in Quebec. To validate this thesis, we examined the trajectory of one of the largest and oldest of these groups—the Société des professeurs d’histoire du Québec (Quebec association of history teachers). For this, we used tools offered by the field of interest group analysis to understand the dynamics of the power play between the actors of the reform. The exercise finally led us to defend the relevance of these tools for the analysis of education policies.