Abstract

This thesis examines how neoliberal policies are presented to Quebec high school students in the mandatory grade 11 Social Studies course called Contemporary World. The main data are the course’s provincial curriculum, the textbook Immediate, and an interview with Immediate’s main authors. By using Critical Discourse Analysis, the content of Immediate is examined to reveal how neoliberal discourses and practices are situated in the text, along with the resistance of anti-neoliberal social movements. David Harvey’s (2005) understanding of neoliberalism as the project of class restoration and dispossession, as well as various perspectives from Global Citizenship Education (GCE) literature and practice, provide the study’s theoretical framework. The most significant finding is that international institutions and their often neoliberal discourse is highly privileged in Immediate, while grassroots oppositional social movements are either misrepresented or missing. In this way, the textbook and the course emphasize mostly the positive results of neoliberal reforms. Moreover, class struggles and the role of labour in combating neoliberal reforms are absent. Neoliberal practices in the Global South receive more criticism, although the complicit role of NGOs is not explored. As for grassroots environmentalist movements, their presence is overshadowed by the sustainable development discourse that privileges institutions and international agreements. Finally, the textbook and the course model a citizen with analytical skills and global knowledge who lacks a critical GCE due to these missing elements: the critique of Canada’s institutions, social agency, feeling, and a more self-reflective understanding of the ‘other’ living in the Global South.