Schools and the Construction of Identity and Individuality: A comparative study between Malawi and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis began by considering the prominence of individuality as a central tenant of Western identity, and the belief that sub-Saharan African nations place more focus on community. Intent on exploring and comparing both of these points of view, this thesis explores the concepts of identity, individuality, and community as they pertain to schools in two different cultural contexts: Malawi and Canada. Utilizing a combination of secondary research, autoethnographic exploration, and open ended, dialogue based interviews, the perspectives of the researcher and three Malawian teachers are considered with regards to the role of schools and to the construction of identity. These teachers all worked in a rural Malawian secondary school, and their perspectives on the topics of identity construction, western influence on Malawian identity, the prominence of community and individuality with regards to student identity, and the role that schools should take in supporting the identity construction process are all explored. These perspectives are contextualized with a detailed exploration of their cultural context.As the researcher plays an active role in the interviews, and shares his own perspectives towards the topics as they pertained to his experiences growing up and teaching in Canada, his background is also carefully explored in this thesis. This thesis is small in scope, and makes no claim to be representative even of all of Malawi. It aims simply to explore topics as they pertain to the lives and experiences of three teachers in a different cultural context, and consider those perspectives in relation to stereotypes and the preconceptions that the researcher may have had or have come across, as well as his personal and professional experiences as a teacher.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".