Documenting and Understanding Black Community Supplementary Educational Initiatives in Montreal from 1900 to the Present

Documenter et comprendre les initiatives d’éducation supplémentaire des communautés noires à Montréal de 1900 à nos jours

Research has demonstrated that Black people’s experience with state-run schooling in Canada is racializing and alienating. Attending only to these facts paints a dismal and incomplete picture of Black education. A fuller understanding of Black education comes through recognizing the various ways in which Black communities have exercised agency with regard to education by resisting and challenging these inequitable conditions.

Montreal, since at least the beginning of the 20th century, has been a site of Black educational activism, seeing the implementation of multiple Black community supplementary educational (BCSE) initiatives, including homework clubs, tutoring, after-school, weekend-school, and summer school programs. However, to date there exists no comprehensive account of the historical emergence and work of BCSE initiatives in Montreal or of their visions and outcomes; nor is there research that looks at both Francophone and Anglophone BCSE initiatives together.  

This research will:

1) create an inventory of BCSE initiatives in Montréal since 1900, and document their successes and challenges from the perspective of BCSE organizations;

2) produce a critical account of the diverse political visions that inform these community responses to state schooling, and the ways in which gender, class, language and heritage influence these visions; and

3) critically analyze the ways in which relationships (such as funding relationships) among Montréal BCSE initiatives, state educational structures, and municipal, provincial and federal governments might impact the realization of these educational visions.   

Principal Investigator: Philip S. S. Howard

Date: 2018-2021