Absence of Praxis, Absence of Progressivism: The Need for Pedagogical Praxis for Progressivist Educators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the common philosophical orientation of both in-service and pre-service teachers in mainstream Canadian public schooling to progressivism. Although the meaning of progressivist theory in education varies, this paper explores a definition that encompasses the desire to teach self-governance and to prepare students for participating in a democratic and pluralistic society. Through a philosophical discussion, a deep reading of the literature and autoethnographic storytelling, this paper explores the ways in which in-service and pre-service teachers commonly define progressivist practice. They do this by juxtaposing progressivism to traditionalism without questioning theory-practice connections and disconnections through reflection and action. This leads to what I call bad praxis and a subversion of the aims of progressivist education because teachers are immersed in narratives that tell them to be politically neutral, that they are incapable of theorizing or philosophizing, and that critical discourse should be comfortable; good praxis gives the impression of being radical. However, progressivist connections to democracy are political; teachers can do more than tactfully cope in the classroom, and critical thinking is not only based in reason but also emotion. In my presentation, I make comparisons to Foucault’s (2008) concept of good and bad parrēsia, and much like the connection he makes between parrēsia and democracy, I argue that the ambiguity of praxis and the deterioration of praxis within progressivist teaching, leads to bad praxis and a failure to walk our progressivist talk. How can in-service and pre-service teachers develop good praxis skills and how might this shift support progressivist goals?
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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 | 0.071 | 0.090 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.127 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.033 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".