Modeles hypothetiques de la competence et d'une formation interculturelles pour des directions et futures directions d'ecole de langue francaise au Canada

Even if one of the missions of French schools in linguistic minority contexts in Canada is to (re)produce the cultures and the language of the Francophone communities, these schools also have to be inclusive to insure the success of students presenting ethnocultural, linguistic, and religious diversity. Thus, principals and future principals of these schools need to develop their intercultural competence (IC). However, IC is not defined in the educational administration literature regarding linguistic minority contexts. Therefore, our study aimed to 1) define the school principal's IC, and 2) design and pilot a training session that fulfills the needs of school principals to understand how it develops their IC. To achieve this goal, we undertook a qualitative study based on a pragmatic-interpretative paradigm and used a research and development design (Van der Maren, 2003) that involves six distinct phases: 1) analysing the need, 2) writing the specifications, 3) design the training, 4) preparing the training, 5) trying out and validating the training, 6) disseminating the results. We developed an intercultural immersion training session in Morocco and seven people from four provinces participated in it. Written exercises were completed and two interviews were conducted. To analyse the data, we used content analysis and QSR NVivo 8 software. Our results of trainees' perceptions pertain to: 1) the IC definition, 2) the development of their IC before, during and after the stay in Morocco that they experienced, and 3) the conditions that influenced the development of their IC. In light of those results, we proposed the following two hypothetical models regarding principals and future principals of French schools in a linguistic minority context: 1) a hypothetical model of IC which includes three components and 12 indicators, 2) a hypothetical model of the international intercultural immersion training session which includes seven conditions. Based on the findings, it can be inferred that an intercultural immersion experience could have a positive impact on the IC of participants and increase inclusion of immigrant school stakeholders.