Recently, actress Anne Casabonne announced her candidacy for the Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ). The public thinking about this seems to have been, “Since it’s going against Public Health and its evidence, let’s go against it.” Even more recently, one-man band Gregory Charles made a noteworthy media outing about young Quebecers dropping out of school. Public reflection has been unclear as to which way to position itself, although many teachers and education researchers have risen to point out that, contrary to what Gregory Charles asserts, gender segregation in education does not exactly seem to have his proofs.
As a former doctor and current doctoral student in education research, I dream of a Quebec where evidence in education circulates with the same fluidity as that on germs and antibiotics. I would like a Quebec where the outcry in the face of an incorrect shock assertion like that of Gregory Charles would be as automatic as that against Anne Casabonne, because we would be certain of what we are asserting and that the whole field could constitute a united front.
Not that I want the reign of the single thought: the debate, on the contrary, advances any discipline. But it progresses more when the bases are solid enough for us to be able to easily absorb their questioning. For any medical student to question the microbial theory and the effectiveness of antibiotics is fine. That biomedical data give him answers quickly is even better.
As a medical student and resident doctor, a resource was very useful to me in terms of antibiotic therapy: the guides to optimal use (GUO) of antibiotics from the National Institute of Excellence in Health and Social Services ( INESSS). INESSS, created in 2011, is an organization responsible for transferring knowledge from research into practice guides that are easily accessible to healthcare professionals. What supportive treatments should be recommended for acute bronchitis? Which antibiotic to prescribe and at what dose for acute otitis media? INESSS offers the answers to these questions in a quickly accessible format, on the Internet, on its application.
I dream of a Quebec where there would be the equivalent in education. This Quebec is not so utopian. The 2017 Educational Success Policy led to a consultation to this effect: should a National Institute of Excellence in Education (INEE) be created or not? The community’s response was negative, given a fear that the recommendations of such an organization would standardize practices, thus harming the professional autonomy of teachers and, through it, the success of learners.
The argument raises eyebrows. Doctors have even more professional autonomy than teachers; is there only one who said that INESSS harmed his practice? No: because in medicine, we understand that autonomy concerns the means of applying the guidelines, of personalizing the principle to each client; we understand that it does not concern the decision as to the intended ends.
An organization such as the INEE, which would aim to “promote excellence [éducative] and the efficient use of resources in the sector of[éducation] (I paraphrase the mission of INESSS), could never harm teaching practice. And if there is a risk of standardizing this practice, it would be in the sense of pedagogical efficiency… which no teacher should logically be opposed to.
That said, just as eight million bodies request personalized deviations from guidelines in medicine, eight million brains request personalized deviations from guidelines in education. It is still necessary to deviate from the right way—hence the usefulness of research.
I therefore hope that the commotion created by the public outing of Mr. Charles will be an opportunity for the world of education to put this INEE project back on the drawing board, which seems to me the best way to linking teaching practice and evidence. We would still have to accept for good the need for quantitative data in education, something that a whole section of the research world seems cautious about.
This reluctance comes, in my opinion, from a bad interpretation of interpretativism… but this will be a debate for a future open letter. What should be learned from this is that education systems would benefit from becoming, like health systems, learning organisms. To do this, knowledge transfer institutions such as INESSS and INEE are essential tools. Stop refusing them.