In Conversation with Jonathan Silin: Past, Present and Future
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anthony Semann (AS) & Cristyn Davies (CD):The HIV pandemic has influenced your work and thinking over many years.In Sex, Death and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS (1995) you shared the personal and social turmoil of this pandemic and its impact on early childhood education and care.In part, your work has been encouraging educators to break the silence on a range of issues perceived to be taboo for children.Do you still have similar concerns regarding silence and childhood?Jonathan Silin (JS): I have more concerns than ever.We're living in an educational environment where the pressures for academic achievement and the proliferation of test-driven curricula are forcing out any possibility for conversations that don't directly contribute to increased test scores.The curriculum is under pressure and teachers are increasingly under pressure as well.I think that there is less and less space for any kind of conversation that doesn't seem immediately relevant to the test-driven curriculum.I've been advising some teachers at an independent school in New York who want to discuss gay and lesbian families in the early years curriculum.They are meeting incredible resistance to even reading simple story books about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer families to young children.I also see it here in Toronto where the introduction of a more liberal, more expansive sex education curriculum was put on hold by the provincial government about two years ago as a result of disapproval from a very vocal conservative minority.So now we're stuck with a traditional, very narrow curriculum.I saw such conservative approaches to broaching difficult issues with children while in Australia as well.In rural settings I was concerned by what I saw as a failure to talk about the kinds of environmental events -bush-fires, droughts, floods -that have become endemic and are directly impacting the lives of children.AS & CD: What is the role of personal narrative in your research and practice?What power do you believe this holds in shaping and transforming pedagogical practice?JS: Personal narrative is compelling and engaging and draws people into a text just as it draws people into your pedagogy.As a teacher educator I believe that we have an ethical commitment to identify who we are outside of the classroom and who we are as teachers.It is important for writers to be present in their texts as it allows the reader to engage in a more extended dialogue with the author as well as with the themes being addressed.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.005 |
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".