For more than twenty years, the key role of cultural facilitators in education has been at the heart of the professional skills of teachers.
At the turn of the 2000s, the cultural competence that served as a foundation for all the others was worded as follows: To act as a professional inheritor, critic and interpreter of objects of knowledge or culture in the exercise of their functions. Twenty years later, this skill is still very much present, but it is now formulated as follows: Act as a cultivated professional, at the same time interpreter, mediator and critic of elements of culture in the exercise of his functions.
In these ministerial reference systems of competences, it is a question of developing in teachers their role of cultural facilitators by focusing on the enrichment of their own cultural background, by stimulating their critical sense and their capacity for appreciation as well as by refining their professional judgment on objects of knowledge or culture. Although this professional competence has been highlighted for two decades, insufficient resources have been granted to the faculties of education and school service centers in Quebec to deploy it. The cultural approach to teaching thus remains little known or misunderstood, and it often remains carried by a few individuals and not by a community which would go beyond the goodwill of certain passionate people.
Yet teachers who fully embrace their role as cultural facilitators are more engaged, open and curious; they thus make their class a place of living dialogue. As Jean-Michel Zakhartchouk underlines, embodying the function of cultural facilitators, “it is the desire to share a good, a set of human works that help us to live, to think, to love, to find answers. like to find pleasure, to want to transmit this look on things which avoids being passive in front of the events of the world, which makes us participate more in the so difficult construction of a better humanity ”. Acting as cultural intermediaries in education promotes the pleasure of learning by making the learning of students more meaningful and more stimulating, because it is culturally anchored.
Urgent measures
Various government measures are urgently needed to recognize the fundamental role in society of teachers who are cultural facilitators by giving them privileged access to the arts and culture, for example through a teacher’s cultural passport which would offer free admission and discounts. exceptional on cultural objects (books, magazines, newspapers, artist’s material, etc.) and cultural practices (going to the theater, museums, cinema, bookstores, etc.).
At a pivotal moment in the history of the world of arts and culture, at a post-pandemic era where everything must be done to bring back to cultural places its main intermediaries and multipliers, it is imperative to (re) give teachers a taste for culture, a taste that will reflect on millions of students. Let’s create a virtuous cultural circle by focusing first and foremost on one of the living forces of society: the actors and actors of education!