Bibliographic record
Abstract
Religious education is, to a certain degree, about boundaries.The extent to which these boundaries are defined, or, to use a less charitable term, policed, is one of the fundamental questions of religious education in Canada today.With several provinces still offering fully publicly-funded religious schools (Catholic separate schools, most notably), and with the range of religious charter school options increasing, the idea of religious school identity has become ever more pertinent.Because Catholic separate schools receive extraordinary public support, the question of Catholic identity in education is a strangely public question.What is Catholic about Catholic schools, and why should they be separated from public schools?It is rare for public discourse to reach so far into discussions of one particular group's religious identity.As a former Catholic separate school teacher, and as a graduate of a Catholic school system, the manifestation of Catholicity in daily life has long been of interest to me.I attended my local parish, played for the parish hockey team (missing fewer matches than masses), and eventually took Catholic theology courses as part of my teacher training program.My experiences in each of these manifestations of religious life was largely positive, and the education I received was, insofar as I can tell, excellent.Seeing my neighbours attend the public school across the street, or play for the public hockey team in the same arena, was, however, periodically confusing.There was a boundary being drawn, and, years after I ceased to be a member of that community, I must confess that I still do not know precisely how it was drawn.What, I frequently wonder, does Catholic mean in particular contexts-educational or otherwise?I am, therefore, quite grateful for the work being done by this year's Early Career Invited Lecturer, Dr. Graham P. McDonough.Understood as a whole, his early career work (especially McDonough, 2012) represents an important attempt to articulate a broad framework for Catholic identity in education.He directly addresses some of the most pressing questions of Catholic education today and, in this invited lecture, linked those questions to the boundaries one might draw around Catholic identity.In a country still considering the implications of the Marc Hall and Leanne Iskander cases, the specific nature of this identity is an important question of public educational policy. Defining Catholic SchoolsMcDonough suggests that Catholic schools be seen as diverse ecclesial spaces built around a Catholic metaidentity, or, to put it more plainly, that Catholic schools feature diverse forms of Catholicism.If directed to Catholic educators and leaders specifically, this argument seems quite compelling.It is surely more defensible to permit a plurality of religious views than a more restricted subset-even within
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.017 | 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 | 0.020 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.054 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".