High School Principal/Student Power Relations in a Distance Education Course Choice Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This multiple-case study explains how nine principals of conventional high schools in Alberta, Canada responded in a context where high school students did not require their principals’ approval to enrol in external distance education courses. The research questions address this through Foucault’s power/knowledge theoretical framework, as manifested by what principals and students said and did in this context. Foucault’s post-structuralist framework of disciplinary, governmentality, and pastoral power techniques offered 31 power techniques for analyzing discursive and nondiscursive practices. The focus of pastoral power is the ethical development of subjects. This study found that the nine principals tended to be conveyors of power, primarily through disciplinary and governmentality techniques. The nine students in this study tended to constitute themselves as targets of disciplinary and pastoral power. In the context of distance education course choice, three dominant power practices operated synergistically: 1) Disciplinary power, Curriculum technique: the school offered numerous approved programs and choices; 2) Governmentality power, Freedom technique: students chose classroom and distance education programs or courses they needed or that represented interests; and 3) Pastoral power, Individualizing Instruction Technique: the school accommodated special life circumstances or learning requirements through classroom and distance education offerings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".