© 2026 McGill Journal of Education / Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

EDITORIAL

Of the 11 articles and one Note from the Field in this general issue, several bring to light issues or subjects that have been occluded or sidelined, whether Julien on the teaching of science education in Haiti (and the need for a common approach); Ruberto, Beaulieu, Baran, and Maurice on the role of learning specialists (resource teachers) in secondary schools (we know very little about what they do in high schools relative to their roles in the private sector); Révauger’s study of whether teachers could recognize cross-linguistic connections between English and six other languages; or Forozantabar and Riveros on the proliferation of school portables and concerns about their potential effects on student learning. Several studies address how to support learning: Carter and Klein on using radical listening and becoming quieter to attune themselves/ourselves to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation calls for action; Leonti, Daigle, and Montésinos-Gelet on reading needs of primary students with different developmental delays; Déry and Leininger-Frézal on empathy in experiential geography teaching; Ramoo and Durand on parsing authentic forms of assessment and conditions for learning; and St-Vincent, Kearney and Fortier on ethically-informed approaches to diversity and inclusion that can be usefully applied by principals. The role played by supports is looked at by two different studies, one by Carpentier, Girouard-Gagné and Sirard on teachers putting differentiation into practice and how supports may differ depending on factors like years of experience, and Ben Alaya, Petit, De France, Barker, Stack, Cimon-Paquet, and Véronneau on vocational learners managing the transitions from school-to-work during a recent education crisis: the pandemic. Finally, Larose’s Note from the Field reflects on how profoundly their teaching of history thematically transformed their practices and deepened student learning. Brief summaries of the articles and Note follow. We hope you will enjoy reading.

Julien provides an overview of the science curricula currently in use in Haiti’s elementary teacher training programs and seeks to understand the role of experimentation and the investigative approach within them. Based on semi-structured interviews with 10 elementary school teachers and four instructors, this study explores the variability of science curricula as well as the role of transmissive approaches and experimentation. Despite their inclusion in recent curricula, inquiry-based approaches appear to be absent from the training practices reported by the participants. The study highlights the need for a common, context-specific curriculum and calls for further research on practical science training programs.

Ruberto, Beaulieu, Baran, and Maurice examine the role of remedial educators in Quebec secondary schools and explore the extent to which this role varies between the public and private sectors. Based on a survey completed by 135 remedial educators, the authors compare their work environments, job duties, and service delivery methods. The results reveal, above all, similarities between the two sectors: intervention accounts for the largest portion of their work, while assessment plays a lesser role. Nevertheless, some differences emerge, particularly regarding individual floating caseloads and administrative responsibilities. The study contributes to documenting a professional practice that has yet to be extensively studied in secondary schools.

Attending to language contact in multilingual contexts such as Reunion Island can enhance language learning and pedagogical practice. Yet, realizing the potential of cross-linguistic connections requires teachers to recognize and critically engage with linguistic similarities. Considering English as a bridge language, Révauger examines connections identified by nineteen pre-service English teachers between English and French, German, Korean, Reunionese Creole, Shimaore, and Spanish. Drawing on language biographies and four contrastive exercises, the findings reveal considerable diversity in perceived cross-linguistic connections. They also indicate that such perceptions may sometimes reflect assumptions not firmly supported by linguistic evidence.

In their study, Forozantabar and Riveros investigate perceptions from various community members regarding the use and proliferation of portable classrooms in Canadian school districts. A two-cycle analysis of 234 news reports from Canadian news outlets between 2010 and 2022 revealed three themes: 1) reasons leading school districts to use portable classrooms, 2) safety and comfort concerns, and 3) alternative strategies deployed to alleviate accommodation issues. Portables are often utilized to manage overcrowding, but also met with apprehension from local communities. Findings point to concerns such as suboptimal physical conditions, a sense of isolation, and the encroachment on outdoor school spaces.

What are our autophenomenological reflexive embodied attunements in engaging with listening and slowing down? This was the research question that animated Carter and Klein to achieve a heightened sense of awareness in the present moment, the present moment being that time and space where hope best resides. They practiced radical listening, which inheres in using the whole body to listen to nature, listen to our inner dialogue, and listen while in conversation with human or non-human others. Radical listening emerged from their work, as non-Indigenous settlers, in a project on reconciliation called Walking Alongside: Taking up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Teacher Education (TE). Their most significant finding, they attest, was learning to create a space where, if it is not possible to be still, we can become quiet: quiet in becoming attuned to nature, to breath, to movement.

Leonti, Daigle, and Montésinos-Gelet study the links between grapheme-phoneme correspondence skills and the recognition and production of written words among students with a developmental language disorder (DLD). Based on a series of standardized tests (spelling test, word and pseudoword recognition test, and similarity judgment test) administered to 97 students from three French-language elementary schools, the study shows that the scores on written word recognition and production tests for students with DLD are similar to those of students with typical language development and comparable reading age, but are lower than those of students with typical language development of the same chronological age. These results contribute to a better understanding of the specific needs of students with DLD in learning to read and write.

Déry and Leininger-Frézal offer an exploratory theoretical reflection on the presence of empathy in geography education, more specifically within experiential geography. First, the article explores the choice of experiential geography in relation to its epistemological and pedagogical foundations, which challenge identity, Otherness, and learners’ relationship to the world. The authors then examine the links between empathy and experiential geography, concluding that experiential geography can be viewed as a means of fostering geographical empathy.

The article written by Ramoo and Durand aims to clarify the concept of authentic assessment, which is central to the learning paradigm, but whose boundaries remain vague. Based on a systematic review of studies that have conceptualized authenticity in assessment, the authors identify seven components: the learner, the task, the resources, the physical and social contexts, the product, and the evaluative judgement. This conceptualization offers an integrated understanding of authentic assessment and highlights the conditions that make it possible to align assessment situations with real-world contexts. It thus provides useful guidelines to support the design and analysis of assessment practices.

Principals encounter ethical challenges almost daily in their work. St-Vincent’s, Kearney’s and Fortier’s research emerged from studying principals in different countries: Canada, Spain and New Zealand. The present article focuses on New Zealand but is informed by that wider international context. The researchers were interested to know how principals in New Zealand responded in situations that involved ethical decision-making with respect to inclusion and diversity. Deploying a typology of approaches developed by St-Vincent, and that have been applied to the other geographical contexts, the researchers interviewed five elementary school principals. What will prove highly useful to others are their descriptions of concrete situations, accompanied by the ethical approach taken (conciliatory, active, preventive, adaptative, accompanying and proactive). The article helps nuance the ethical leadership approach depending on problem, school and principal; there is no ‘one size fits all’. What is most important, the researchers stress, is that principals are aware of which approach they tend to use, and consider alternative approaches that might work better.

Carpentier, Girouard-Gagné, and Sirard highlight the support needs related to the differentiation of teaching practices among educators. The article aims to describe and understand these needs, as well as to examine how they vary according to certain characteristics, including teaching experience, age, gender, and training. This study employs a mixed-methods design using online surveys and focus groups with a sample of 294 teachers from the Samares School Service Center. The results show that there are significant needs related to the differentiation of teaching practices among both experienced teachers and those new to the profession.

Even though the COVID-19 pandemic has come and gone, its usefulness for researching conditions for learning remains. Ben Alaya, Petit, De France, Barker, Stack, Cimon-Paquet, and Véronneau look at how vocational students navigated school-to-work transitions. Students managed these transitions differently, but among the most salient factors was their seeking out social support, whether from classmates and teachers, from professionals or through informal networks. Crises in education, like the pandemic, can affect support-seeking behaviours. Covid-19 presented an opportunity to test the hypothesis that resiliency in the form of support-seeking would act as a protective factor. Distinctive to this study was that the researchers were able to study the participants over time, at two different moments: pre- and during-pandemic. The results revealed a more complex picture than was expected, where, for instance, learning from a distance benefited those who tended to be more introverted and autonomous in their learning. These findings call for further research to pull out the implications for future practice and study.

The Note from the Field proposed by Larose discusses the results of a three-year theme-based approach to 20^th-century history at a secondary school in Montreal. During this teaching experiment, students chose the themes to be studied and their exam questions through a democratic process. The author notes that this approach enhances students’ autonomy and allows for the exploration of topics that are more current and relevant to them, but it does not necessarily boost academic motivation, at least among students at risk of dropping out. On the other hand, it requires the teacher to be more attentive, to avoid falling into a routine, and to constantly renew their approach.

TERESA STRONG-WILSON, VALDIN TEAGUE TSOPGNY, JULIE LACHAPELLE,

MARTINE DE GRANDPRÉ & VANDER TAVARES