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In 1950 in France, Dr Max Fourestier introduced the concept of dividing the school day into two parts. In the morning, students followed activities that were intellectual and classroom-oriented, and in the afternoon, they had physical education classes. This programme was implemented in Gambetta Elementary School in Vanves, a city on the outskirts of Paris (Fourestier was Gambetta's doctor). In 1953, he expanded the concept by organising innovative experiments such as the "forest class" and the "snow class", wherein nature was given a central role. Our study shows how Fourestier's international scientific reputation played an important role in the Franco-Canadian transfer of the school day concept; we also address the transfer of the concept of the place that physical education and nature held in the French school system. Our analysis identifies the cultural elements that facilitated the Canadian appropriation of a model that promoted an educational ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genealogy, or the study of one's ancestral patri-lineage, has a long and esteemed pedigree in French Canadian and Québécois history. From Cyprien Tanguay's late-nineteenth-century encyclopedias to René Jetté's updated versions more than a century later, genealogy has been an important component of French Canadian nationalisms. Tracing one's ancestry back to the early St. Lawrence settlement in the seventeenth century has provided Québécois subjects with opportune political and social capital with which to make territorial and national claims legitimate. Through a case study approach, I explain how genealogy provides the grounds upon which Québécois and French subjects remember a shared past. Specifically, I examine a variety of sites of memory in the French countryside, including a museum that relies on ‘genealogics’ to call the French Canadian Québécois back to its roots. As such, I demonstrate how the biological, read as a contemporary articulation of Balibar's notion of the racialsupplémentnecessary to nation building, travels across the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]