Fonds PR3697 - Yvonne Hébert fonds

Yvonne Hébert was born in 1942 in Edmonton, Alberta, to Laurent Hébert and Alma Brulotte. Laurent Hébert was born in Villeneuve, Alberta, and attended the Edmonton Jesuit College in the 1930s. He was the first employee hired by the Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta (ACFA), working as Director General of the provincial office in Edmonton. He married Alma Brulotte from Guy, Alberta, in 1939.

Yvonne Hébert attended school in St. Paul, Morinville and Edmonton, graduating in 1959 from the Académie Assomption. She was granted an Alberta Teaching Certificate in 1961. She received her B.A. in Elementary Education in 1974 and her M.A. in Linguistics and Folklore in 1976 from the University of Utah. In 1982 she was granted a Ph.D in Linguistics by the University of British Columbia. Her Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Transitivity in Nicola Lake, Okanagan. She started to teach in 1983 at the University of Regina, and in 1985 started a 28 years career in the Faculty of Education, University of Calgary, from where she retired in 2013. She is Professor Emerita of Languages and Diversity in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary. She is the mother of two children, Lisa Hébert (1961) and Martin Stenger (1963).

Dr. Yvonne Hébert’s academic interests focused on immigration, integration, citizenship education, youth, identity, democracy, minority studies, bilingualism and second language education, policy and educational reform. Her publications include several books: <em>Critical Perspectives on International Education</em>; <em>Negotiating Transcultural Lives: Belongings and Social Capital among Youth in Comparative Perspectives</em>; <em>Citizenship in Transformation in Canada</em>; <em>Indian Education in Canada</em> (2 vols.); as well as articles on second generation youth, their mobility and identification strategies. She published in Canada, the U.S.A., the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. She gave lectures in 2009, 2010 and 2011 in China on the treatment of minorities, on civic and political knowledge, and on cosmopolitan identifications.

She served on several editorial boards in Canada, China and Spain. She has served as national president of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) and was founding coordinator of the Citizenship Education Research Network (CERN), now part of the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada (CIESC), within CSSE. She is a lifetime member of the Gandhi Society of Calgary and the Canadian Education Association.

In 2010, she was awarded the Roger Motut prize, the highest award for scholarly excellence in Francophone Alberta. In recognition of her scholarly leadership and research contributions to Francophone education and community in minority contexts, she was awarded the commemorative Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.