Bibliographic record
Abstract
Verna Kirkness, Creating Space: My Life and Work in Indigenous Education. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013. 208 pages. ISBN: 978-0-88755-743-9. $34.95 paperback.Creating Space is a valuable contribution to the field of Canadian education in general, and to Indigenous education in particular. After a long and distinguished career, Verna has returned to her home province of Manitoba. Her recounting of her life and work does read like a conversation over a cup of tea, but due to Verna's involvement in positions and roles at local, provincial, and national levels, it is a very enlightening chat for any reader interested in the historic progress of Aboriginal education in Canada. Her book makes fascinating reading and once began, could not put it down!Verna divides her story into seven chapters. Chapter one is devoted to telling about her family and her early school days. She notes that, unlike today, schools on the reserve did not have to follow provincial curriculum guidelines. An educator can appreciate the huge movement over the years, as today's curricula in Manitoba are outcomesbased; thus, schools and teachers on reserves, and anywhere else, can select materials that best suit their students. While not quite as old as Verna, and from Saskatchewan rather than Manitoba, recalled reading the same books as she did, and indeed, many of our textbooks were also covered in brown paper book jackets! With negative stories that seem to persist about the reserve school system, and particularly about residential schools, it is wonderful to hear about Verna's positive experiences: I believe that on the whole we had caring teachers. . . . My love for school was not deterred by any of them (5). She recounts being encouraged by non-Aboriginal teachers to continue her education, and makes no mention of any racism toward her from the largely nonAboriginal community in Teulon. Interestingly, Verna did not receive formal Indian status until later in life, and she dares to wonder if in some instances that helped her. She also notes that her community enjoyed activities often associated with Metis culture, for example square dancing and jigging (10).Verna talks about her teaching career in chapter two. She began teaching as a Permit Teacher after only six weeks of training, and then, after her first two years of teaching in a Metis community, she returned to Normal School and afterward went to her home community of Fisher River to teach. Her leadership potential was identified early on and she soon became a senior teacher. Verna also taught at Birtle Residential School as well as at Rossville Indian Residential and Day School at Norway House. Verna's recounting of her time at each school gives a different, more positive picture of such schools. She does note, however, that no one was thinking then of culturally-appropriate pedagogy or resources. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".