Sexual tension : the imagined learner projected through the recontextualising of sexual knowledge into pedagogic communication in two curricula in South Africa and Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study conducts a textual analysis of the structure and discourses present in two sets of sex education curriculum documents - one from South Africa and one from Ontario, Canada. It did so to make visible the imagined learner projected by these curricula in the recontextualising of sexual knowledge into pedagogic communication. Using a deductive framework built on Basil Bernstein’s concepts of classification, framing, vertical and horizontal discourse and instructional and regulative discourse to recognise the structure, and an inductive coding process complemented by Louisa Allen’s discourse of erotics to recognise the discourses and strategic silences present and absent, it concludes that the imagined learner would have a sex negative, context independent orientation to meaning, be heterosexual and not yet be sexually active. The study problematises this learner, presenting statistical evidence that the vertical discourse of the school is significantly disconnected from the horizontal discourse of the everyday. The research raises questions about the role of recontextualising in reproducing a sex negative hegemonic discourse of adolescent sexuality and, through a unique coding scheme, provides a framework for recognising the relative implicitness and explicitness of regulative discourses and their respective relations to power and control over sexual knowledge.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".