Rhetorics of Play in Kindergarten Programs in an Era of Accountability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we conduct a deductive analysis, using Sutton-Smith's “rhetorics of play,” of the published kindergarten programs that have guided Ontario kindergarten teaching since 1944. Our analysis is used to gain an understanding of how we in Ontario have arrived at a point where play-based learning has been taken up by developers of the provincial kindergarten program and approved as a pedagogical focus by politicians. The predominant discourses appear to have changed from a romantic view of play as a natural, child-centered activity, to a discourse of play as progress, with an emphasis on the developmental benefits of play and learning outcomes of play. We believe that the use of the rhetoric of play as progress has been key to the continued prominence of play in Ontario kindergarten programs. It represents ideologies of schooling to which policy-makers seem to be attuned in this era of accountability.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".