Dear Classroom: A speculative look into post-secondary classroom design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically, classrooms have been a space of rigidity and unchanging order. From the very desks we were assigned as ‘our space’ within the learning space, to the abuse of Indigenous peoples in Indian Residential Schools, to the frequent use of corporal punishment by teachers to maintain order. Over the past decade there have been numerous changes and strides for creating more inclusive and desirable experiences for students within the education system. As an example, the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD U) located in Toronto, has been a prime example of a historical institution taking action at 145 years old – with cluster hires of Indigenous and Black faculty and the introduction of more classes and curriculum with a decolonized approach. While the work is being done, there remains a gap in decolonizing education when thinking about the physical aspects of the post-secondary classroom. This MDes thesis explores how Speculative Design might act as a tool in creating decolonial discourse around the design of classrooms leading to more inclusive and desirable futures for students. The thesis attempts to (1) introduce and share concepts of Speculative Design and futuring of educational models in decolonizing the classroom at the post-secondary level; (2) to engage in participatory action research that offers interactive cases (positioned as ‘classroom mysteries’) for facilitating dialogue and responses, and (3) to consciously remove the ‘expert-non-expert’ power dynamics in gathering research data, and creative outcomes. The intersection of Speculative Design (imagination) and Action Research (action) methodologies allows for a more inclusive data collection approach that centralizes open dialogue and imagination confirming that the use of Speculative Design as part of the research process can be a successful tool in imagining and creating more desirable and inclusive spaces for students; and can create a space where critical dialogue around decolonizing post-secondary classrooms can occur.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".