Lingering Discourses: Jean Jacque Rousseau’s 18th-Century Images of Mothers, Fathers, and Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a critical discourse approach (Fairclough, 2003; Foucault, 1972; Luke, 1997, 2002; Rabinow, 1984; van Dijk, 1993; van Leeuwen, 2008) this paper examines the text and embeddedmeaning conveyed in Jean Jacque Rousseau’s novella Émile. This treatise written in the 18th century includes Rousseau’s conceptualization of best practices and a set of educationalguidelines detailing habits to avoid and the necessary combination of“natural” and “progressive” approaches recommended to raise children as moral citizens. In our analysis we discuss the ways Rousseau uses binary descriptions of girls-boys, mothers-fathers, and learners-tutors separately and in opposition. We go on to situate his novella as an early example of expert advice on parenting, where Rousseau positions himself as an educational expert by simultaneously defining the maternal role in early education andthe role of education in society. We contend that Rousseau’s works are founded on particular beliefs about the source of knowledge and construction of meaning that continues to constrain the formation of authentic partnerships among and between parents and early childhood educators. We argue that this discourse—and, importantly, the values, beliefs, and attitudes it conveys—lingers in Canadian early childhood education learning communities and that the vestiges of these early ideas truncate and unnaturally shape our ideas of parenting, teaching, and learning by socially positioning families and teachers in ways that make it difficult to engage in co-constructionof curriculum. We suggest that by better understanding and deconstructing this discourse we can move our thinking forward and authentically engage in coinquiry.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".