Back to School? Historians and the View from the Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1986, Chad Gaffield challenged historians to go “back to school” in order to better understand children’s experiences. This article addresses the historiographical approaches historians have used since 1986 to elucidate continuity and change in the contexts and cultures of schools, and the content of instruction. The history of schooling contexts reflects increasing efforts to use resources efficiently and to make schools more comfortable places to be. Studies of school and classroom culture have revealed a shift away from the centrality of teacher authority. Research on curricular change describes a process characterized by renovation rather than transformation. To what extent have historians been successful in meeting Gaffield’s challenge? Historians have sought out rich and diverse sources that illuminate how adults’ concerns and priorities shaped students’ educational experiences. Now they need to find sources that better reveal children’s voices. The article argues for attentiveness to the achievement of a multifaceted understanding of students’ experiences of state schooling over time.RésuméEn 1986, Chad Gaffield a mis les historiens au défi de « retourner à l’école » afin de mieux comprendre les expériences vécues par les enfants. Cet article aborde les approches historiographiques utilisées par les historiens depuis 1986 pour expliquer la continuité et le changement dans les contextes et les cultures des écoles, ainsi que le contenu de l’enseignement. L’histoire des contextes scolaires reflète les efforts croissants déployés afin d’utiliser les ressources de manière efficace et de rendre les écoles plus confortables. Des études sur la culture de l’école et de la classe ont révélé une distanciation face à l’importance de l’autorité des enseignants. La recherche sur l’évolution des programmes d’études décrit un processus caractérisé par la rénovation plutôt que la transformation. Dans quelle mesure les historiens ont-ils réussi à relever le défi de Gaffield? Les historiens ont cherché des sources riches et diverses qui illustrent comment les préoccupations et les priorités des adultes ont influencé les expériences pédagogiques des élèves. Ils doivent désormais trouver des sources qui rendent davantage compte de la voix des enfants. Cet article plaide pour qu’une plus grande attention soit portée à la compréhension multifacette de l’expérience des élèves de l’école publique dans le temps.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".