The veil between worlds : examining the present by exploring the fantastic in a secondary classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This action research study was conducted to examine the ways that speculative fiction texts, fantasy literature in particular, can establish and expand students’ critical literacy skills, and to argue that fantasy has a place in the classroom. The study focused on students’ connections between fantasy texts and the contemporary world and their ability to identify and critique the role that power plays in a fantasy novel. English Studies 12 students in a high school in British Columbia, Canada, chose a fantasy novel and then read, discussed, and responded to their chosen book in literature circles. The students applied critical literary theories to their texts as a tool for critical literacy as they engaged with and analyzed the power structures and relations within their texts. This study contends that fantasy literature is a ideal vehicle for teaching and practicing critical literacy—the act and art of reading the world (Freire, 1987). Fantasy and critical literacy make an excellent pair because each requires and values a multiplicity of perspectives and truths. By its very nature, fantasy provides a portal to different worlds and perspectives that, when approached critically, provides students with points of commonality between the fantastic world and their own. Fantasy’s liminality can support students’ own abilities to break down borders between themselves and the world. Indeed, by applying the combined tools of critical literary theory and critical literacy to fantasy literature, students were able to demonstrate more complex readings of their texts than they had been able to before.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| 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".