Blackboard/Whiteboard: The Discursive Construction of the International Baccalaureate in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a series of educational programs for students aged 3 to 19 offered in schools around the world.Originally created for a transient population in need of a portable and recognized curriculum, it has evolved to become an alternative to local curricula in countries such as Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.This manuscript dissertation includes four articles that examine perceptions of the IB in Canada and the implications these perceptions might have for the wider society (e.g., publicly funded education or real estate).The study was conducted in two parts: (i) online survey and semi-structured interviews to gain insight into how admissions personnel at Canadian universities view the IB in relation to other curricula; and (ii) corpus linguistics combined with aspects of critical discourse analysis to examine a 1.5 million word corpus of Canadian newspapers on how the IB is represented in the public domain.Results from both domains showed consistently positive views, suggesting that there exists a dominant (hegemonic) discourse surrounding the IB.Results also suggested that the positive view of the IB tends to create a negative view of things non-IB (programs, students, schools).Since one is constructed as "better", there is an implied comparison that seems to go unnoticed.Using corpus-based critical discourse analysis, patterns of language use were analyzed to make visible values and assumptions that discursively construct the IB as superior.The linguistic patterns and strategies identified appear to bear a striking resemblance to discourses of discrimination and difference, such as (1) collectivization of people into a homogeneous group, (2) attribution of particular qualities or characteristics to the group as a whole, and (3) perpetuation of the stereotype through repetition, and eventually "common sense knowledge" which is taken for granted and more iii assumed than stated explicitly.In the context of Canada's publicly funded education system, where the IB has grown increasingly popular, this positive view is problematic as it privileges a select few while disadvantaging the rest (e.g., by preferred admission into universities), thereby creating a context of insiders and outsiders.Pragmatism vs. Idealism ....
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".