AQPC

Author:  Luc Desautels, philosophy teacher, Cégep régional de Lanaudière in L’Assomption

‘’Program approach’’, ‘’The integration of general education and specific training’’, ‘Comprehensive assessment’’ and ‘’A moral and political philosophy course that analyzes the problematics linked to student programs of study’’ are guidelines that found their way into college thinking more than ten years ago today.  Let’s look more closely at the compulsory philosophy course that gave rise to a number of practices, including grouping students by program or by family of programs, or no specific grouping whatsoever.  Did this desire to link the teaching of philosophy to specific student programs of study deliver the expected results, especially relative to increased student interest and improved success rates?  This is the question we attempted to answer through research financed by PAREA and this article presents our main conclusions1.

A reform with an uneven track record

The initial examination of data compiled from answers provided by teachers and students leads to a number of observations relative to reform implementation.

The vast majority of philosophy departments (76%) actively participate in the general education committees of their college.  However, their participation in various program committees is less pronounced (60%).   As regards the integration of philosophy into their program’s comprehensive assessments, over half the teachers questioned (63%) state that this integration never happens at their college.  Even more surprising, nearly one third (30%) state that they don’t take ministerial specifications into account in their classes which require that they analyze ethical problems linked to their students’ programs of study.   As for the students enrolled in this course, only a small minority (4%) are grouped homogeneously.  The remainder are divided into two equal parts: those without any particular grouping (48%) and those grouped by family of programs (48%).   Also noteworthy, according to teachers and students alike, the subjects most frequently tackled in this course of moral philosophy deal with citizenship issues and not with issues relating to the various programs of study2.   In spite of this, a strong majority of students say they are satisfied with the course (79%) and the teaching given by their teacher (86%).  Most of them succeed in the course and receive good grades.  However, only a third of students indicate that they are very interested in the course.

1 An exploratory survey in the form of a questionnaire was completed at the end of the 2003 Winter semester by 25 teachers of moral philosophy and 637 students, in 13 francophone public and private colleges of various sizes and from different regions.  The final report of this research entitled Le cours de philosophie éthique propre au programme au collégial: bilan d’une recherché exploratoire, descriptive et évaluative de la situation actuelle, is available through the Centre de documentation collégiale at http://www.cdc.qc.ca.