Unpacking Multiculturalism in the Classroom: Using Current Events to Explore the Politics of Difference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The content of this paper stems from an interactive workshop conducted by its authors at the 2nd Joint Annual Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association in the fall of 2011. As the conference theme was "Revisiting 40 Years of Multicultural Policy in Canada," the goal of the workshop was to bridge the gap between theory and practice by demonstrating how to bring multiculturalism into the classroom through discussion of current events documented in the media; despite the recognition of multiculturalism as the foundation of national identity in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the greatest challenge for teachers remains how to incorporate the concept into their teaching practice. In examining how multiculturalism has evolved to become more inclusive since its implementation as federal policy—having been broadened from focusing only on race and ethnicity to a range of human differences, all of which have political and pedagogical ramifications in the classroom and beyond—participants in the workshop were encouraged to question how the privileges enjoyed by groups that represent the norm in society factored into recent Canadian and American news events. Six recent media reports were selected in order to facilitate a discussion that allowed for the "unpacking" of a particular component of identity, in relation to either race, gender, class, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, or religion. Cet article se veut une synthèse d'un atelier d'interaction entre les auteurs et les participants de la 2 e Conférence annuelle présentée conjointement par l'Association des études canadiennes et l'Association de études ethniques canadiennes tenue à l'automne 2011. La thématique de la conférence, portant sur une «Rétrospective de la politique multiculturelle au Canada sur une période de 40 ans» avait pour objectif de rétablir les liens entre la théorie et la pratique en démontrant comment transposer le multiculturalisme en salle de classe, et ce, en discutant d'événements d'actualité répertoriés dans les médias. Bien que le multiculturalisme, tel que défini dans la Chartre des droits et libertés, soit reconnu au Canada comme le fondement de l'identité nationale, le plus grand défi des enseignants consiste à concevoir comment intégrer un tel concept dans les pratiques d'enseignement. En examinant comment le multiculturalisme a évolué pour devenir plus inclusif depuis sa mise en oeuvre en tant que politique fédérale - une fois qu'on a élargit le concept, focalisé initialement sur seulement la race et l'ethnicité, pour considérer toute une variété de conditions humaines, qui ont toutes des ramifications politiques et pédagogiques dans la salle de classe et au-delà -, les participants à l'atelier se sont vus encouragés à se demander comment des privilèges détenus par les groupes qui constituent la norme de la société se retrouvent au coeur des nouveaux et récents événements d'actualité, tant au niveau canadien qu'états-unien. Les auteurs ont proposé l'analyse de six rapports parus récemment dans les médias pour faciliter une discussion qui permettrait de mettre en évidence une composante identitaire donnée par rapport soit à la race, au genre, à la classe socio-économique, à l'orientation sexuelle, aux capacités et handicaps, ou à la religion.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".