Walking the Tightrope: Exploring ‘Risky’ Issues and Discomfort in the Higher Education Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recently, there has been much public, political and scholarly concern over the tensions between academic freedoms and effective pedagogies, student requirements and responsibilities for learning and their rights as ‘consumers’. Working with uncomfortable issues or ‘risky’ issues is at the nexus of these possibly competing narratives. Drawing on theoretical work on pedagogies of discomfort and critical dialogue with higher education (HE) youth work lecturers, the authors consider what counts as pedagogically discomforting in and beyond the classroom and slippages between issues deemed ‘emotional’, ‘sensitive’ and ‘controversial’. A specific tension in preparing students for professional practice is that HE pedagogues face a challenging dual duty of care to students and practice settings and the concurrent need to assess and prepare students to engage in sensitive arenas of practice. The authors ask how discomfort could be ethically handled within professional training contexts and what are the key institutional implications for enabling meaningful pedagogies of discomfort and challenge?
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".