Investigating Teachers' Understandings of Gender Equity and Achievement in Postfeminist Times
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing from feminist post-structuralism and critical social theories, this thesis examines the significance of postfeminist and neo-liberal influences on teachers’ perspectives about gender equity and girls’ success within the context of Ontario’s high-stakes standardized testing policies and their pedagogical experiences in the classroom. The significance of this inquiry is in its capacity to contribute to further theorizing about how teachers are negotiating the changing meaning of gender equity through a neo-liberal and postfeminist lens. It also adds to the growing body of research that investigates the significance of socio-economic background with regards to girls’ achievement and participation in school and its erasure from the educational policy agenda. Seven grade nine and grade ten English teachers and literacy consultants in three public school boards across Southwestern Ontario participated in the qualitative study. Using informal semi-structured interviews, they were asked open-ended questions relating to their understandings of gender equity and success, as well as their views towards the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT). Findings indicated that despite most of the participants’ willingness to disrupt or contradict negative gender stereotypes or assumptions about gender equity, they inevitably ‘repositioned’ or explained these ideas within the alluring neo-liberal and postfeminist rhetoric of choice and hard work. Conflicting and contradictory perspectives ran throughout the interview data, demonstrating how teachers are capable of agency and that they must be provided with the professional space to reflect on their practices and how they may be complicit in producing harmful and narrow gender constructions.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".