The Politics of Teaching Financial Literacy Education: A Case Study of Critical High School Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices in Ontario and Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teachers’ voices have been largely excluded from the academic and political debates regarding the aims and merits of financial literacy education. Through case study research, this project examined the beliefs, practices, and lives of 10 teachers in Québec and Ontario who teach financial literacy at the intermediate and senior levels. Specifically, the teachers in this study report taking a critical approach to financial literacy education–a subject that tends to be framed in simplistic and individualistic terms as mere personal financial decision-making. In an analysis of in-depth interviews and deliberative inquiry focus groups with self-identifying critical teachers and investigation into various documentary sources, I detail the ways in some of these teachers adhere to mainstream understandings of financial literacy education while others work to reframe it towards more critical and economically just ends. This research results in the development of a framework for critical economic literacy education, documenting the intellectually demanding set of skills, knowledge, and pedagogical strategies a critical economic literacy requires of students and teachers. Findings also bring forth distinctions in teachers’ ideas about criticality, revealing that teachers navigate between common, critical, and transformative sense orientations in sophisticated ways to achieve their pedagogical aims. Last, I investigate how criticality emerges in teachers, narrating the ways in which their personal biographies, professional and political activities, and intellectual pursuits inform their critical teaching in relation to financial literacy. This case study is further contextualized by the current political moment in which escalating economic inequality and the widening racial wealth gap, the current financial crisis, impending climate disasters, and antidemocratic politics worldwide convey a sense of urgency and a timely relevance for a more critical and transformative financial literacy education.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".