Between maintaining teacher impartiality and protecting student dignity: Teachers’ responses to unacceptable student speech about politically sensitive issues in France and Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How should teachers respond when students make dignity-undermining comments during discussions of politically sensitive issues? This qualitative, transnational study examines how 13 secondary teachers in France and Quebec (Canada) maintain impartiality while protecting student dignity in response to unacceptable student speech. Drawing on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews, we identify three key findings. First, teachers report using a spectrum of responses ranging from dialogical to silencing strategies, which they modulate based on the perceived extremeness of the speech. Second, teachers use impartiality deliberately as a pedagogical tool to challenge unacceptable views. Third, participants promote respect for dignity adaptively via the “political criterion,” treating it as a mandate to intervene only when dialogical strategies fail. These findings refine existing theories of teacher impartiality, disclosure, and controversial issues education, while offering transnational insights into how teachers navigate tensions between fostering open dialogue and protecting human dignity in classroom discussions.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".