At the TCFGIM, we firmly believe that gender equality will be achieved through education. Over the last years, we therefore leaded many projects in the field of education, which allowed us to develop an expertise on gender and education. For a little background, here are a few projects that have marked our work in education in recent years.

Persévérer dans l’égalité

In 2016, we participated in the project Persévérer dans l’égalité with 2 regional concertation organisations, Montreal Hooked on School and Complice – Persévérance scolaire Gaspésie-Les Îles. The aim of the project was to review and gather existing knowledge relating to the school perseverance of girls and boys, as well as to propose the implementation of planification tools, intervention practices and actions taking into account gender equality in a school setting. The goals of the project were to prevent the learning and interiorisation of gender stereotypes, to value girls’ educational success as much as boys by using an approach tailored to their specific social realities, to promote gender-equal relationships, and to target low-income environments where parents have less schooling and were young people, both girls and boys, face high dropout rates. This project allowed us to produce and experiment with the Persévérer dans l’égalité guide (available in French only).

Strategies for equality in school retention

The TCFGIM then wished to improved the approach developed with Persévérer dans l’égalité to allow workers in education to really integrate these findings in their educational practices, and to develop intervention strategies adapted to the realities of different teaching environments, from early childhood to the CEGEP level. It is during this project that the present website was put in place. At that time, it gathered tools and intervention strategies for every school level. The tools have been adapted to the various contexts that exist in the Gaspesie and the Magdalen Islands, those of francophone, anglophone and Mi’gmaw communities.

Between 2019 and 2023, a few dozen organisations of the Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-Madeleine region benefited from training and support, in French and English, so that their staff starts to implement some of the interventions strategies to break down gender stereotypes, both in their own practices and in the interactions between students. 

This project was made possible by the financial participation of the Secrétariat à la condition féminine and the Fondation Solstice 

Teaching Equality

Thanks to this new funding obtained from the Secrétariat à la condition féminine, the TCFGIM can pursue its work around equality and education. This time, training workshops on specific themes will be proposed to the educational staff to take into account the needs expressed by different school teams in the past years, as well aas to ease a sustainable transformation of educational practices. New, practical, and directly usable tools have been developed to raise students’ awareness about sexist gender stereotypes, in a way that also considers other stereotypes associated with other groups in our region (immigrant, 2SLGBTQ+, indigenous, racialized or neurodivergent people, for instance). Training workshops as well as individualized support will also be offered to the schools and educational organisations of the 3 linguistic communities of our region: Mi’gmaw, anglophone, and francophone communities.