How Young is Too Young? Exploring Beginning Teachers' Assumptions about Young Children and Teaching for Social Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates what preservice elementary school teachers assume about children's capacities to learn about equity issues and how teachers might translate teaching for social justice into actual classroom practices. Participants said they did not see the age of their students as a barrier to teaching for social justice, although their ways of conceptualizing this varied considerably, and those teaching grade 4–6 students were generally more risk-taking in the curricular and pedagogical choices they made. We found that the concepts of childhood innocence and developmental appropriateness mediated the topics and approach to topics that beginning teachers considered. Roughly half the participants believed that younger children are relatively uninterested in the events of the day, are incapable of forming nuanced opinions, and are unable to analyze political issues; while the other half disagreed. Participants concerned about engendering negative emotional responses from elementary students made more limited and generic responses to name-calling or teasing rather than naming specific forms of oppression or prompting students to reflect critically on hurtful language and behavior.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".