“A whey dem say fe demself?” African/Black people’s auto/biographies as pedagogical tools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the major pedagogical challenges, for teachers at all levels and in all disciplines of the education system, is to acknowledge Africa’s presence in the evolution of world civilizations. Knowledge about the existence and evolution of African civilizations before European contact have been suppressed, distorted or erased from textbooks. Furthermore, only relatively recently have a number of historiographies on such topics as the internal, trans-Sahara and trans-Atlantic slave trades and slavery have begun to be produced in academia. Moreover, scholars have been slow to recognize the central role of Africa in disciplines such as economics, art, literature, science and music in the global currents of intellectual and philosophical thought. Hopefully, the voice, agency and self-representation of African/Black people have steadily emerged from the shadows in various forms of life writing, in addition to original research and publications across disciplines. This paper and accompanying workshop for teacher educators is this author’s initiative to bring a historical consciousness to both a curricular and pedagogical need for engagement with the scholarship produced by African-descended peoples. My thesis is that various genres of life writing - memoirs, autobiographies and biographies - can enhance the learning and teaching about Africa and African descended peoples in such a way as to bring about a holistic understanding of the historical and institutional bases for their contemporary human condition, locally and globally. Teacher educators who prepare language arts and social studies teachers for the public school system will find texts at various reading levels among the resources. Teachers of the humanities and social sciences at the tertiary level will have the opportunity to explore ways in which auto/biographies may enhance their learning and teaching.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".