Neutralizing Political Action with Education – a call to return to roots of resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This proposed paper aims to contribute to developing a theory of the purposes and effects of a semi-professional education program for mental health workers and addictions counselors. I draw for this paper first upon my experiences as a feminist activist, and as a mental health worker. Now I am an academic and teacher in both a teacher education program in a research-intensive university and an instructor in a mental health worker and addictions counselor program in a private vocational college. Teaching in both a professional program (the teacher education program) and a vocational school has afforded me both an inspiring and troubling view of education programs meant to ‘train’ people to provide services to other people. This paper will make reference to the teacher education program by way of comparison but is chiefly concerned with analyzing the potential and problems with the mental health and addictions worker program.. I was for years a front-line worker, much as my students in this program are training to become. However, my training for the paid work of mental health worker was inspired by what I learned from participation in the political work of a feminist anti-violence organization. The services we provided there were part of our shared vision and activism to achieve women’s freedom from male domination. When I took a paid position in a drop-in center for people with psychiatric diagnosis, I learned on the job from the people who used our services. I was also aware of and somewhat informed about the activities of “the mad movement” or anti-psychiatry activism. Former patients of a large psychiatric hospital in collaboration with a psychiatric nurse and a social worker had founded the centre a dozen years prior to my employment there. Government-imposed criteria and standardization has reduced opportunities for systemic advocacy or for members of the centre to take leadership in the operations or direction of organizations like this drop-in. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and praxis is an important component of the theoretical basis for this paper. “The fundamental effort of education,” said Freire, “is for the liberation of people, never their domestication” (Freire, 1971). A significant proportion of the students in the vocational college are themselves in recovery from addiction, psychiatric illness and/or learning disabilities. In addition, a significant proportion are racialized and come from poverty. These students, for the most part, do not have the cultural, political or economic capital to enroll in a university or public college. Waitlists and criteria for entrance effectively bar them from public institutions. Freire’s approach to adult education was to invite students to use their life experiences to serve as a foundation for learning. I value that aspect of the college’s approach, in that they encourage those who have been “service recipients” to enroll. I am troubled by an emphasis on medicalizing the social and political inequities with which people are contending, and promoting a professionalized individual ‘service’ approach to social problems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".