The Danger of a Single Theory: Understanding Students’ Voices and Social Justice in the Peruvian Andes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Context Working towards social justice in education requires students’ voices to be heard and understood. This is especially the case for students from marginalized populations. Prior research has shown the value and importance of students’ voices for school retention, academic success, school inclusivity, and student buy-in. However, more research is needed on how adults understand and interpret students’ voices and implement their understandings in school practice and policy. Purpose/Objective This paper uncovers the danger of misinterpreting students’ voices due to assumptions about concepts such as success and social justice. I explore this issue by interpreting first-generation Quechua (indigenous) students’ voices about success in the Peruvian Andes through four different paradigms concerned with social change, social reproduction, and social justice. The discussion places into dialogue feminist theory, critical theory, postcolonial theory, and development theory in order to highlight the implications of each interpretive framework for responsive education policy. I show how interpretations based on each theory offer divergent school policy options, the danger of a single theory for interpreting student voice. Participants The coresearchers for this paper are 14 young women from Quechua communities who are the first in their families to attend secondary school. Working with them are a woman from a Quechua community, a woman from Central Europe, and a man from the United States. Research Design A collaborative ethnographic case study utilizing student voice methods. The students developed the theme and topic for research during a student-led seminar. Based on the students’ questions, the adults helped facilitate the creation of an interview protocol with the students. The group answered the questions on the protocol and used the protocol to interview the students’ parents. We held three total focus group discussions to develop the protocol, discuss findings, and interrogate ideas of success. Conclusions/Recommendations The results highlight the vastly different interpretations and policy implications of students’ voices based on each theory—highlighting how social justice is a complex concept that requires discussion across theoretical orientations. The findings also show points of overall congruence, and cross-theory trends. Recommendations are for educational leaders and researchers (teachers, parents, administrators) to refect and think about empirical information from multiple theoretical frameworks in order to become more aware of the influence of one's own assumptions in educational decision-making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".