The road to employability through personal development: a critical analysis of the silences and ambiguities of the British Columbia (Canada) Life Skills Curriculum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of a life skills career education curriculum for schools in British Columbia, Canada. This curriculum calls for the development of a set of life skills that are positioned as central to students’ employability. At the heart of the curriculum is a focus on personal development, in particular, the need for students to develop self understanding and learn from role models how to face and conquer adversity. This paper builds on existing criticisms of how notions of employability and life skills have displaced policy orientations and interventions that might address structural problems of unemployment, with a personal development orientation that places the burden of change and adaptation entirely on individual workers. The goal of this inquiry was to illuminate the assumptions and the underlying ideological terrain giving shape to this curriculum. Informed by the critical frameworks of Nancy Fraser and Ulrich Beck, as well as critical curriculum scholars, this inquiry found a number of disturbing silences and ambiguities in the personal development orientation. On the one hand, the lessons acknowledged the significance of emotions in students’ lives and the possibilities for students to learn from family, community and the wider society. On the other hand, the emphasis on individual responsibility and a heroic orientation to transcending adversity reflects the dominant neo‐liberal ideology wherein future employment depends on having the ‘right’ attitude and making the right choices – contextual and systemic factors fall away. Life skills curricula, like the one examined in this project, are important sites of investigation for they reveal the major shifts that have occurred in the political economy of career and worker education.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".