When dreams take flight: How teachers imagine and implement an environment that nurtures Blackness at an Africentric school in Toronto, Ontario
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
State schooling in North America has drastically under-served Black communities, and much educational research has explored visions of schooling that might provide a more relevant and socially just educational experience for Black students. Toronto’s Africentric Alternative School is the product of just such a vision. This article explores the aspirations, experiences, and practices of the first cohort of teachers at the Africentric Alternative School as they exercise agency to implement this vision. Findings demonstrate several key features of the teachers’ work, which they offer as their understanding of Africentric pedagogy: (1) they cooperate with each other, parents, and community to establish a familial environment for all school stakeholders; (2) they endeavour to establish classrooms that affirm students’ lived and political Blackness, that value the diverse ways in which Blackness is lived, and that help students to challenge oppressive practices among themselves; and (3) they persevere through sometimes challenging conditions created by historical and ongoing educational injustice, endeavouring to preserve the dignity of all members of the school community. Teachers, students, and parents consistently contrast these conditions to those they find in other school settings, which therefore positions these teachers’ pedagogies as a response to antiblackness embedded in public schools in Toronto.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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 it