No School Left Undemocratic: Experiencing Self-Government In A Free School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While schools have been assigned the role of introducing students to our current democratic systems, many have highlighted the paradox of teaching democracy in an undemocratic context (e.g. Biesta, 2007). Alternative models of schools that operate democratically such as free schools (democratic schools in which students and teachers largely have similar rights and obligations) can offer a great deal in terms of democratic education. In this paper, I will talk about the ethnographic study that I conducted about the experiences of Canadian free school students during school meetings (democratic activity during which students with teachers decide on the activities, operations and rules of the school). During this project, I attended 4 school meetings, spent a period of five weeks making observations in a free school and completed 17 interviews about these experiences. Based on this, I maintain that these meetings arose in a school that operated according to a consensus-based model and that students, while attending these meetings, experienced a combination of feelings that mostly included appreciation and concerns while being involved in decision-making processes. As well, I will contend that students, after having taken part in several school meetings, developed skills and attitudes associated to citizenship such as critical thinking and self-confidence. For conventional schools, this means that providing students with opportunities to take decisions democratically could help to foster such skills and attitudes.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| 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".