The personal is political : the late nineteenth century Russian schoolmistress speaks for herself
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In late nineteenth century Russia, a stereotype of schoolmistress as passive victim and amateur featured prominently in the dominant pedagogical discourse. Because present day historians have failed to consider the factors of gender and estate when presenting information concerning the living and working conditions and status of Russian teachers, this stereotype persists in contemporary literature concerned with that country's educational history. Through an analysis of 14 uchitel'nitsy's published memoir/articles, this thesis demonstrates that at least some of the women who entered teaching were competent and self-assured. In fact, almost all schoolmistresses -- who wrote and published their writings --engaged in a counter-discourse challenging the stereotype. The thesis presents its case by first establishing the context in which the pedagogical discourse took place. It then introduces the field of discourse and its participants -- the editors of the journals in which uchitel'nitsy published and the schoolmistresses themselves. In order to place the 14 schoolmistresses in their own context, they are compared with a group of schoolmasters who also wrote and with primary schoolteachers in general. Chapter 3 examines the advice schoolmistresses passed on to their colleagues and women intending to enter the profession. Chapter 4 discusses the layers of discourse schoolmistresses' memoir/articles contain. This thesis attempts to prove that at least some Russian schoolmistresses possessed a gender and estate-determined professional ethic. The existence of such an ethic negates the stereotype of schoolmistress as passive victim. In the stereotype's place, uchitel'nitsy offered a self-created fiction of schoolmistress as servant of the people. Future studies must include this fiction in discussions that specifically concern schoolmistresses. This self-image, or at least the fluid world it suggests, must feature in any discussion concerning journal discourse of the period.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".