Learning in Solidarity: A Union Approach to Worker-Centred Literacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article introduces the reader to developments with unions and literacy, a labour activity that is gaining a toe-hold on today’s union agenda. The historical role of unions and literacy is explored, as well as its relationship to more traditional labour education. Some tough questions are asked about who is participating in union activity and who is left out, and how literacy has the potential to reach many union members who are not yet active. The article takes the reader inside a class of night cleaners. Building on the the real situation of a worker/participant who has been injured, the instructor facilitates a learning process that builds literacy skills while exploring avenues for collective recourse. While union-based literacy challenges many traditional assumptions and practices both in the workplace and within the labour movement, it is gaining ground and finding resonance within a growing number of Canadian unions, federations and the Canadian Labour Congress. With a popular education approach that builds on the Latin American and other Third World experience, literacy is revealed as an important metaphor for inclusion and democratization. L’article présente l’évolution de la participation syndicale à l’alphabétisation, qui commence à s’inscrire au programme syndical. Il traite du rôle historique des syndicats en matière d’alphabétisation et des relations entre celle-ci et les formes plus traditionnelles d’éducation syndicale. De difficiles questions sont posées au sujet des personnes qui participent à l’activité syndicale et de celles qui en sont exclues ainsi que des moyens par lesquels l’alphabétisation peut permettre à de nombreux membres qui ne sont pas encore actifs de s’impliquer dans leurs syndicats. L’auteure fait découvrir la réalité d’une classe de personnel de nettoyage de nuit. En se fondant sur un cas vécu où une personne participant au cours s’est blessée, l’animatrice favorise un apprentissage permettant à la classe de développer ses capacités de base en examinant des recours collectifs possibles. L’alphabétisation axée sur les travailleurs et les travailleuses remet en question de nombreuses hypothèses et pratiques traditionnellement employées en milieu de travail et au sein du mouvement syndical, mais elle trouve de plus en plus d’appuis et gagne du terrain au sein d’un nombre croissant de syndicats et de fédérations du travail du Canada ainsi qu’au Congrès du travail du Canada. Dans le cadre d’une approche d’éducation populaire s’appuyant fond sur l’expérience acquise en Amérique latine et dans d’autres parties du tiers monde, l’alphabétisation constitue une importante métaphore de l’inclusion et de la démocratisation.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".