Discounting the Political: Understanding Civic Participation as Private Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Around the world there is concern about the disengagement of citizens from participation in civic life. Emerging from that concern have been calls for new initiatives in civic education and many jurisdictions have developed and implemented new programs in the area. Much of this work has gone forward with little or no research on the prior conceptions of participation that exist among citizens. This paper reports on a study designed to map the conceptions of civic participation held by a group of recent African immigrants to Canada compared with a group of native-born Canadians. The focus here is on findings that indicate participants made a clear distinction between civic activities they saw as political and those they saw as nonpolitical. These findings coincide with theoretical literature that posits a divide between the two and raises implications for curriculum planners and teachers attempting to broaden conceptions of the political and foster engagement. Le désengagement des citoyens de la participation à la vie civique est un souci partout dans le monde. C’est ainsi qu’émergent de ce problème des appels au développement de nouvelles initiatives en faveur de l’éducation civique et que plusieurs juridictions ont développé et mis en oeuvre de nouveaux programmes dans le domaine. Beaucoup de ce travail a été réalisé alors qu’on n’avait pour ainsi dire pas de recherche sur les conceptions de la participation qui existent déjà chez les citoyens. Cet article présente une étude qui vise à dresser le portrait des conceptions de la participation civique d’un groupe d’immigrants africains récemment arrivés au Canada et de les comparer avec celles d’un groupe de Canadiens de naissance. L’accent est mis ici sur les résultats qui montrent que les participants font une distinction claire entre les activités civiques qu’ils considèrent comme des activités politiques et celles qu’ils considèrent ne pas être politiques. Ces résultats vont dans le même sens que les théories qui posent comme postulat une séparation entre les deux et soulèvent des implications pour les planificateurs de programmes et pour les enseignants qui tentent d’élargir les conceptions du politique et d’encourager l’engagement politique.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".