“Yeah, but I’m Shy!”: Classroom Participation as a Social Justice Issue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In-class participation is a common component of many university students’ course grade, yet there has been some debate over whether it is fair to grade participation, given that some students are “ naturally” introverted. In this paper, we problematize the central assumption that the arguments against grading participation rest upon: that classrooms are neutral spaces into which a range of personalities come together, each with unique needs that should be recognized and supported. As educators whose work and teaching is grounded in critical social justice frameworks, we argue that there is a fundamental dynamic that is missed when silence is presumed to be a-political. We argue that classrooms are microcosms of the wider society and as such, are political spaces in which dynamics of unequal social power also play out; there is no neutral classroom or natural mode of engagement. In this paper, we lay out the foundation of a social justice approach to teaching and problematize the notion of neutral classroom spaces. We speak back to some of the most common arguments against grading classroom participation and in doing so argue that participation in classroom settings is a central element to dismantling social injustice in our wider communities.
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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 | 0.032 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".