The Voluntariat: A Freirean framework to understand the nature of undergraduate international (medical) experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite literature documenting limited and asymmetrical benefits along with ethical issues, short-term international volunteering is increasingly popular among North American university students as a perceived advantage when applying to professional healthcare schools or the job market. Academic institutions are also encouraging students to pursue international experiences in order to cultivate values as global citizens. These experiences are most typically limited to economically privileged students. Furthermore, international activities in developing countries often lack a pedagogy of social justice and may confirm a simplistic understanding of development. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's "liberation pedagogy" provides a framework for understanding the limitations of international volunteering, whereby the presence of privileged volunteers implementing Western models of development may hinder aspects of local movements. Regardless, university students face intense competition in accessing opportunities, such as medical school, and pay large sums to participate in volunteering to strengthen their academic credentials. We propose that these students form "the voluntariat." They simultaneously play two roles by, first, contributing to the conditions that oppress the very communities in which they volunteer and, second, by playing a role as objects of oppression by the liberal institutions of learning and employment to which they are attempting to gain access.
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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 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".