"We Went in as Strangers, and Left as Friends”: Building Community in the Wahkohtowin Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes interviews with students of an interdisciplinary community-based class in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The class— “Wahkohtowin” (“kinship” in Cree)—brought together university students with youth from Oskayak, an Indigenous High School, and members of STR8 UP, a community-based organization for former gang members. The course centred on the theme of “justice,” and students discussed legal and literary texts related to policing, criminal trials, and prison, and shared their own experiences and stories about justice and injustice. The students described the class as a profound experience of “community,” which caused them to reflect critically upon structures that create and reinforce inequality and estrangement and impact quality of life. This paper describes the class within the larger context of community-engaged pedagogy and Indigenous approaches to community engagement. We explore major interview themes centred on the complexities of creating community in the classroom. Participants discussed encountering “strangers”; telling and witnessing traumatic stories; unsettling privilege; and enacting resistance and solidarity. Ultimately, the Wahkohtowin class intervenes in dominant models of engaged pedagogy and community-service learning, disrupting notions of a university-community binary, and creating a space where students began to practice solidarity and imagine a quality of life based on equality and justice for all.
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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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.030 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".