Cultural distance between inuit education and the formal schooling process: conceptualization and definition

Inuit students in Nunavik, Canada, currently learn in a trilingual and bicultural school environment that affect their perseverance and educational success. According to the statistics from the Quebec Ministry of Education and Higher Education, the graduation rate of secondary Inuit students in Nunavik would be 22% after seven years of schooling. This rate is much lower than the average Quebec population which is 75% (MEES, 2013). In this context, does schooling institution fail to fulfill its mission with the majority of the Inuit students population in Nunavik? (PIC, 2019; TRC, 2015). We postulate that Inuit students are heirs of a distinct cultural heritage from the one defined in the official Quebec curricula. First being educated in their family and community, Inuit pupils have learned from their own traditional culture. Then, in school, students evolve in two cultural curricular contents which are juxtaposed than integrated in a process of schooling. The processes of transition from one educational, linguistic and cultural environment to another complicate their academic progress as well as the work of their teachers (Maheux, 2016). A research team (Pellerin et al., 2019), including Inuit partners and university professors, has undertaken to explore the relationship between these two paradigms by using the concept of cultural security (Dufour, 2015) and intercultural education (Godenzzi, 2007). Our presentation will report steps of this collaborative action-research project aiming to understand the constituent processes of the relationship between Inuit education and formal schooling in the schools of Inuit communities.