Ongoing attachments with stuffed toys: conceptualizing childhood and teaching through transitional objects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we highlight how adults remain emotionally involved with transitional objects, such as stuffed animals, carried over from their childhoods. Drawing on focus groups involving undergraduate students enrolled in teacher education and childhood studies programs, we found that the participants’ reflections of their stuffed animals opened onto layered meanings: 1) tactile experiences of materiality and sensation; 2) personal memories of innocence and paternal protection; and 3) conceptualizations of uncertainty and anxiety in adulthood. While we found that stuffed animals can be important access points to underrepresented feelings of vulnerability in adulthood, we also noted that these transitional objects can be used to entrench normative notions of teaching, development, and childhood. We suggest that transitional objects can be resources in fields devoted to the well-being and growth of children, especially as they help prospective teachers work through the ambivalences and defenses that accompany the work of education and care.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".