Identity, Subjectivity, and Schooling: Portugueseness and the Educational Deselection of Portuguese-speaking Students in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The academic trajectories of Portuguese-speaking students in Toronto, Canada, have been characterized as underachieving and truncated. Concurrently, the voices of Portuguese-speaking students themselves have been relatively absent from reports on their rates of underachievement and school dropout. This critical school ethnography explores Portuguese-speaking students’ school experiences in a Toronto high school to contextualize these statistics and expose how identity and subjectivity inform their school (dis)engagement. While peers and parents inform aspects of said (dis)engagement, thus far these have been the main if not only factors to explain this underachievement phenomenon. This ethnography, however, demonstrates that school personnel and their expectations appear to also play a role in some students’ decisions to deselect schooling. This dissertation exposes discourses that circulate in classrooms and other school spaces that construct Portuguese-speaking students and their parents in Toronto as working class immigrants. These discourses (inclusive of phrases and actions) draw on language, nationalism and diaspora, and class and labour to construct dominant depictions of what I and others (da Silva, 2012) have termed portugueseness. Portugueseness becomes a subjectivity that marks the Portuguese-speaking student subject for certain experiences in schools. In addition to reflecting on their experiences to illustrate how portugueseness is constructed, participants’ experiences and narratives revealed that association with portugueseness (or being marked as Portuguese(-speaking)) placed them disproportionately at risk of experiencing certain disciplinary practices in school. These disciplinary practices reference dominant depictions of portugueseness, namely disciplining language, dropout and disability. And, participants recounted both their defiant and compliant responses to these disciplining practices. Finally, disciplinary practices appear to inform educational deselection, a process that sees some students drop out of school and others remain enrolled despite deeply disengaging with school and putting forth a bare minimum of effort to be pushed through, rather than be pushed out of, their high school trajectory.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".