The Role of Colonial Ideologies in Mediation: Racialized Young Learners’ Sense-making during Collective Reading of Science and Mathematics Picture Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While picture books and read-aloud activities are recognized as tools for fostering disciplinary sense-making among young learners, little attention has been paid to the implicit influences of geopolitical colonial power (Mignolo, 2009) and settler colonialism (Bang et al., 2014; Marin et al., 2020) during such interactions. This study draws on sociocultural theory of mediation (Vygotsky, 1978; see also Cole, 1996; Esmonde, 2016) and the conceptual framing of ideologies-in-pieces (Philip, 2011) to examine the dynamic mediation and construction of the geopolitical colonial matrix of power and identity in early science and mathematics learning (Takeuchi, 2021) from the perspective of critical sociocultural theory. Employing critical and decolonial interaction analysis (Marin, 2020; Philip & Gupta, 2020) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), this study examines how young students (primarily Asian children) and a teacher understand science and mathematics concepts by responding to the taken-for-granted pieces of colonial ideologies inscribed in picture books in a Canadian kindergarten classroom. Findings reveal how racialized children perpetuate, subtly disrupt, and negotiate colonial ideologies circulated in/through collective reading activities. The study contributes to understanding the role of colonial ideologies in mediation, and questions the assumed neutrality of young learners’ disciplinary learning through classroom-based science and mathematics picture books reading activities, toward equity in early learning.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".