Teaching ‘in Town’ or ‘Around the Bay’: Comparing Rural and Urban Primary/Elementary Teachers’ Workload Concerns in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teachers’ workloads is a topic that is gaining attention from both researchers and the media in Canada, although rarely from an occupational health perspective. Even more rarely has attention focused on comparing teachers’ workload concerns in rural and urban contexts.This paper examines the impact that the workloads of primary and elementary teachers in rural and urban regions of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, have on their health. The author conducted 30 individual in-depth interviews with rural and urban primary and elementary teachers, and other education representatives. The participating teachers completed detailed one-day task diaries, which were then discussed in the interviews, and were invited to take part in a written feedback process. They were questioned on their perceptions of primary and elementary teachers’ teaching and domestic workloads, the consequences of this work for their health and wellbeing, and their suggestions as to how these workloads could be improved. Concerns particular to rural teachers included: a relative lack of resources; lengthy commutes; the difficulty of getting away from one’s work in a small community; multi-grade classrooms; extra responsibilities in small schools; the emotional labour involved in teaching in communities with a large migratory working population; and the lack of alternative jobs for rural women. Rural teachers also identified some positive aspects of teaching in a ‘community school’. Concerns specific to urban teachers included: large class sizes; teaching students who do not speak English as a first language; and certain challenges in parent-teacher relationships. Different strategies for managing childcare were also an important rural-urban difference for teachers’ domestic workloads. In conclusion, the author suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the ways that rural and urban contexts shape primary and elementary teachers’ workloads and occupational health.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 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".