Cultivating community : a story of cross-cultural learning and empowerment in the downtown eastside of Vancouver
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In multicultural cities such as Vancouver, high proportions of inner city residents and immigrants (including refugees, domestic care workers, and citizens for whom English is a foreign language) are, for various reasons, socially, economically, and politically excluded from the mainstream. In attempting to narrow the divide that separates those on the "outside" from those on the "inside" of society, the planning profession has become increasingly concerned with the idea of planning with, as opposed to for, marginalized individuals. This approach is most often referred to as "community-based" or "empowerment" planning. This thesis explores the role conversational English as a Second Language (ESL) can play in the empowerment planning process by analyzing the "ESL Summer Pilot Project" as a case study. Collaboratively planned and implemented with residents of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) who patronize the USC Learning Exchange, the story/case study reveals how a total of 19 DTES residents helped nearly 70 immigrants practice what they need to effectively integrate into society; that is a cultural understanding of the who, what, where, when, and most importantly, how questions relating to life in Canada, and the means to ask those questions conversational English. The story also reveals how, by taking a leadership role, these DTES residents were able to increase their sense of self-confidence, self-esteem, and capacity to make a difference in their own lives and communities. After situating the ESL Summer Pilot Project story in the empowerment planning literature, I based my analysis on my own observations and on those of the nine "ESL facilitators" who participated in the focus groups I led after the pilot had concluded in the summer of 2004. What I found was that the empowerment planning process involves, more than anything, the development of mutually trusting, mindful, and caring "planner-participant" relationships and eventually, "participant-participant" relationships, that rely on the continued use of cross-cultural dialogue (or, in this case, conversational ESL) in order to link people’s knowledge and love to action.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.045 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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".