Irène Senécal and Moniques Richard as agents of change in art education in francophone Quebec (1940–2015): From drawing to multimodality

Abstract

This article focuses on the roles of two agents of change, Irène Senécal and Moniques Richard, in francophone Quebec between 1940 and 2015. During these decades, modernist and postmodernist art education replaced traditional drawing education. Our goal is to examine how these leaders succeeded in bringing changes to the school milieu and to the internal dynamics of the disciplinary field of art education. Through case studies, we raise a number of points about these agents, concerning their backgrounds, their located educational actions, their theoretical affiliations, their network of influence, and the cultural and social context of the period. We use the concept of the agent of change as an innovative and distributed leadership, and the metaphor of turbulence to situate the innovations in relation to important changes in Quebec’s school programmes and to better understand the turmoil that characterizes these changes. Senécal took part in the child-centred paradigm shift in the 1950s and introduced a modernist approach based on the principles of design in the 1960s while Richard contributed to an in-depth questioning of the limits of modernism in the 1990s, which led to an understanding of youth culture in the 2000s and a multimodal approach in the 2010s. Their paths lead in different ways to changes in the schools through rich networks of collaboration, creating turbulences between paces of stability and innovation.