The critical work of memory and the nostalgic return of innocence: how emergent teachers represent childhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how participants enrolled in teacher education and childhood studies courses represented their understandings of childhood through a selection of artefacts discussed in focus groups at four sites: Montréal, New York City, Ottawa, and Toronto. To situate our inquiry, we theorise nostalgia in relationship to the construction of childhood innocence, with a focus on children’s everyday objects and playthings in upholding this ideal. We further trace the construction of innocence to discourses of social exclusion and defences against difficulty. While participants used their artefacts to represent personal memories and social contexts that disrupted an idealised category of childhood, they also returned to a nostalgic trope of innocence, which was particularly pronounced in their understandings of childhood under COVID-19. We advocate for the creation of time and space for prospective and practicing teachers to mourn the idealisation of innocence and to examine the unequal conditions of vulnerability that both children and teachers live.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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 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".