Discourses of dominance : Saskatchewan adult basic education curriculum and Aboriginal learners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The intention of this work is to explore how Aboriginal learners are produced in the Saskatchewan Adult Basic Education (ABE) curriculum. In addition, this study examines the production of instructor identities in the curriculum. This thesis explores the social and historical contexts influencing the production of the ABE curriculum. Current prevailing discourses about Aboriginal people influence the curriculum documents. These discourses construct a grand narrative about Aboriginal people, producing Aboriginal people in particular ways that become acceptable and legitimate ways of thinking about and behaving toward Aboriginal people. This work examines how such a grand narrative functions to uphold dominance and structural inequalities rather than challenge them. The effect of reinforcing the current, particular grand narrative about Aboriginal people is that, rather than challenge dominant ideologies, the new curriculum re-inscribes them. This work employs the methodology of discourse analysis as a means of examining the production of particular identities for Aboriginal learners in ABE and uses deconstruction to explore the ways that the documents betray themselves in relation to their objectives. This thesis provides analysis of the ways that the curriculum documents produce and reproduce Aboriginal people as deficient and requiring change. This work provides analysis of the conflict within the documents between a desire to challenge dominance and the re-inscription of dominance through discursive practices. In addition, this work demonstrates how the ABE curriculum aids in the production of dominant instructor identities, and how such dominant identities assist instructors to define themselves as innocent and helpful. This analysis of the ABE curriculum reveals that while the curriculum aspires to be a proponent of social justice for Aboriginal learners it has many weaknesses in this regard. This work concludes with recommendations for changes to the curriculum and instructor practices, and for further critical analysis.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".