Charles-Antoine Bachand

Over the past few decades, significant work has been done regarding the epistemic beliefs of history teachers. However, nuanced epistemic beliefs do not appear to manifest as regularly as may be expected in teaching practices (Wilke et al., 2022). While exploring the normative injunctions imposed in part by the hidden curriculum (Giroux & Penna, 1979), the “school form” (Barthes & Alpe, 2018), and the challenges that history teachers face, this article argues that explicit and implicit demands made on history teachers generate a form of practical epistemology, which goes beyond epistemological beliefs. While at times this appears at odds with their understanding of history as a discipline, it enables them to meet the diverse mandates and directives they encounter. We believe that the concept of practical epistemology (Gholami, 2017) provides avenues for reflection that deserve to be pursued. Lastly, regarding criterialist epistemology (Maggioni, VanSledright, & Alexander, 2009) and historical thinking (Seixas & Morton, 2013), we emphasize that they themselves could be subjected to a critical review by both students and teachers in their practice.

This article argues that although the rise of data-driven government and management practices may give the impression of depoliticisation, the data used in educational policy and discourse can actually mask the ideological aspects of these choices and disempower educational actors. This article examines some of the highly political and ideological processes involved in quantifying human phenomena. The authors show some of the effects of governance by data on education, the management of education systems and research, giving recent examples from Quebec. Finally, they explore the conditions under which data can reinforce the agentivity of educational actors and which could foster an ethics of data and a critical culture associated with it.

Focusing on work carried out in Quebec by researchers inspired by his work, this article explores the thoughts of educational sociologist Martyn Hammersley on educational research and, more specifically, the forms it takes in the context of evidence-based practices. This article provides a brief overview of Hammersley's critiques and recommendations for educational research, its methodologies and evidence-based practice. Finally, it considers the prospects for Hammersley's work in the current Quebec context, particularly in the context of the Quebec government's creation of the Institut national d'excellence en éducation (INEÉ), which promotes the idea of evidence-based practices.