An Insider's Perspective: The Dropout Challenge for Canada's First Nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This modified case study honors the voices of 21 Cree participants, including nine students, six parents, four community leaders and two Elders. This study, written from an insider's perspective, identified more than 50 reasons why First Nations students dropped out of three provincial high schools located in northern Alberta, Canada. The results were collapsed into several categories that can best be generalized as resulting from the effects of colonization. Canada's First Nations have a long history of oppression, colonization, and the resultant soul wounds. The four participant groups collectively identified five common themes why students dropped out of provincial high schools. The commonalities included racism/cultural conflict, poor student/staff relations, marginalization, alienation, and systemic labelling. In addition, each group identified separate reasons: students identified alienation, personal identity, and relationship concerns; parents identified distrust of the education system, marginalization, and lack of involvement; the community leaders identified a sense of powerlessness to initiate change and the intergenerational effects of residential school. The Elders also recognized the intergenerational effects of residential school. The data indicated provincial high school authorities have failed to acknowledge the role that Canadian history has played and have not recognized the need to establish, and then maintain, positive relationships within the First Nations community. In addition, participants felt authorities chose to exclude professional development that would address, from a First Nations perspective, and the past genocidal attempts. Most First Nation adult participants felt like outsiders in the education of their children, a feeling that has perpetuated the sense of marginalization. The data suggested provincial school leaders including teachers, administrators, and board members need to find creative ways to ensure provincial accountability and to improve their with First Nations peoples. Ironically, not one participant identified “academic difficulties” as a reason for dropping out. While the number of First Nations students leaving provincial high schools is high, eight of the nine student participants in this study returned to school, thus indicating their resilient nature, despite the fact that most left due to racial/cultural concerns.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".