My duty of reserve as president of the Accreditation Committee for Teacher Training Programs (CAPFE) prompted me to stay away from the “arm wrestling between Minister Jean-François Roberge and [ce] committee of experts responsible for evaluating teacher training” reported by Marco Fortier in The duty of August 10, 2022. But the allegations of Julien Prud’homme, in an article published the next day, still by The dutyconvince me to get out of this reserve.
According to Mr. Prud’homme, “if the baccalaureate in secondary education were a clear success, we could live with the disadvantages of the CAPFE, but it is not true that the work of the CAPFE has led to very convincing results” .
We must therefore first recall that bachelor’s and master’s degrees in secondary education are not at issue in this discussion. Qualifying master’s degrees have existed in secondary schools for more than ten years. The CAPFE is therefore not opposed to master’s degrees in teaching.
However, CAPFE must ensure that programs leading to a teaching certificate comply with ministerial policies and frameworks, and in particular that people who enroll in these programs have the required prerequisites.
Thus, a person trained in history or classical studies can enroll in a qualifying master’s degree. I have taught several people with this profile. They were great students and now they are great teachers. However, in most cases, these students had to take several prerequisite or concurrent courses in geography, for example, to complete their training.
A master’s degree in preschool education and primary education poses other problems, because the teachers trained by such a master’s degree must teach in several fields of knowledge: first language, mathematics, science… This is one of the elements that posed a difficulty during the examination of the files for which the CAPFE offered its assistance to the universities concerned so that they improve their respective projects.
Mr. Prud’homme will not solve the problem of the “slippage of registrations” in history (Prudhomme, 2020), a field “which has experienced the most significant declines in recruitment in recent years” (Dorais and Pâquet, 2020), by creating another.
We must then repeat to Mr. Prud’homme that the CAPFE does not interfere with the means used by universities to train students. Universities have an obligation of result, not of means. CAPFE’s analyzes do not relate to adherence to a dogma, but to the consistency between the means proposed by universities and the ends they must pursue, which are reflected in various frameworks, such as the new competency framework (enacted by Minister Roberge in December 2020) and the Regulation respecting teaching licenses.
Finally, I must specify that the CAPFE, under the Education Act, is made up of four preschool, elementary or secondary education teachers, one member of the professional staff (such as remedial ) and three people who teach at the university.
It must also fulfill its role as a quality assurance body by basing itself not on partisan political pressures or prejudice against an institution or chapel, but on analysis criteria and operating methods. In doing so, it deals impartially, fairly and equitably with the requests sent to it concerning the creation of new teacher training programs and the modifications of programs already accredited.