A river can be studied. But can it be taught?
For five years now, I have been organizing the Parcours laurentien. The general education course in Quebec literature is the driving force behind the project. Our readings, oriented towards the Saint-Laurent, provide the impetus for an end-of-semester trip. A bus takes my group and me from the greater metropolitan area to Bic National Park. We do not take the highways, preferring to crisscross the old Chemin du Roy and the Route des Navigateurs. With colleagues from different disciplines (biology, geography, cinema), we have organized this trip whose implications, we believe, are much broader than those of a modest six-day trip.
The St. Lawrence River literally becomes our classroom. Since the first edition of the Parcours, students have been there. Despite the rising cost of living and the undeniable appeal of traveling abroad, despite certain prejudices about Quebec, they “get on board” and accept this invitation to cross an immense, changing and more exotic territory than what was initially imagined.
During the session, works, whether classic or contemporary, become our gateways to discovering the ecosystems of the St. Lawrence. The act of opening a book, discovering a story, a poem or an essay, is coupled with direct contact with a nature and a society that extends far beyond the theoretical and the digital. At a time when citizens and institutions are seeking to establish a worthy defense of the environment and find fruitful ways to meet the challenge of the ecological transition, it is essential that young Quebecers equip themselves with knowledge anchored in this immense territory that they share.
Traveling the St. Lawrence becomes an immersive and meaningful lesson. Beyond the tourist attraction of the beautiful sunsets of the Lower St. Lawrence, students acquire cultural, scientific, social and economic benchmarks. They discover several regions, often little-known, that give them a new perspective on Quebec.
Following the river, its cities, villages and parks reveals to them the populations that have evolved on its banks. River traffic opens their eyes to international trade and to a certain face of globalization. The journey also allows them to discover our tangible, intangible and natural heritage; marine, floral, animal and forest biodiversity. To learn about the issues — crucial — on water. With more than 200 organizations from the research community, the Réseau Québec maritime supports us in this initiatory process by promoting meetings in the field with researchers and stakeholders in oceanography and biology, who are as concerned about the fate of the river and the oceans as they are about food autonomy, technological innovations and ecological transition. Each stop, from Lanaudière to Wendake, from Île d’Orléans to Kamouraska, and all the way to the Gaspé Peninsula, becomes a pretext for a particular issue.
For several years, I have been working with students from all over the world and from Quebec. Many of them have seen other cities on the planet. But, they admit, many of them are unaware of what Quebec has to offer. They come from here and elsewhere: Venezuela, Iraq, Egypt, Haiti, Morocco, Algeria, Mexico, France. Each year, students from Nunavik also join the adventure. Six days following the river, six days making it a subject of study in its own right.
The students already have a better understanding of who they are and what—as a social project—they can contribute to. “I thought there was nothing to see in Quebec, I was wrong,” a student told me in Rivière-du-Loup. In Berthier-sur-Mer, the sky is overcast, the winds are strong, and the rain is veiled. At the end of the trip, this student of Caribbean origin confided to the group: “This is the first time I have experienced the wind in a safe way.” Recalling her childhood, where hurricanes passed, she joined our study on the metaphors of wind and tide in the writings of Félix Leclerc, Anne Hébert, Mireille Gagné and Monique Durand. She is touching on a reality that will probably never leave her for the rest of her life.
For the past five years, the Parcours laurentien has been reflecting on the dialogue between disciplines, on education in eco-citizenship, on Quebec and indigenous cultures, on the hypothesis that nature has rights, on the reference to Quebec as an object of study in its own right. This year, the Cégep de Victoriaville has begun its own version of the project. Of course, the Parcours is not an international journey, in the literal sense. But it is not so local either. Taking its roots in local ecosystems, the bridges are obvious with the destinies of other rivers, the Nile, Rhine, Danube, Yangtze, Mekong, Amazon, Mississippi, these “laboratories of the world of the 21st centurye century”, as the writer Erik Orsenna describes them. Could it be an “intranational” journey with international stakes, as I like to say?
Culture itself is a constant challenge to interpret, especially at a time when digital platforms are outsourcing it. General education at the college level, which aims to support it, must inquire about environmental issues. A common culture requires common reasons, sociologist Fernand Dumont would say. And, before being made up of discourses, these benchmarks are first and foremost commonplaces (to be taken literally), as the climate crisis sometimes brutally reminds us.
Why travel to Quebec when you are a student? And besides, how do we learn to look at it, this Quebec of today? Beyond the sole tourist gaze, we must learn to see it, and the Saint-Laurent at its heart, as a territory of cultures shaped by thousands and millions of years. It must be for us a place of knowledge, studies, and curiosity.
“What is a river?” wrote Pierre Perrault at the end of his life. A question as vast as the estuary to which he was already advancing, in his collection All islands published in 1963, the beginning of an answer: “It is on the banks of the Saint-Laurent a great reserve of landscapes and discoveries, where we will anchor our boats and our knowledge.” In the legendary documentary quest of this poet of the river, we continue the reflection – and the world it opens up – with an educational project placing the Saint-Laurent at its center.