A Pedagogy of Discomfort: A Qualified Defense
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis considers Megan Boler’s proposal for a pedagogy of discomfort, an approach to social justice education that harnesses students’ emotional responses of felt discomfort, such as anger or guilt, in order to prompt them to critically interrogate their existing beliefs, assumptions, and ways of seeing. Upon highlighting critiques of politicized curricula, I consider one potential objection that may be levelled against a pedagogy of discomfort, namely, that this pedagogy constitutes an imposition on students by the educator, infringing on students’ freedom to hold certain beliefs, assumptions, and ways of seeing. I argue that in cases where the would-be participants in a pedagogy of discomfort are the beneficiaries of the particular unjust social structure under scrutiny, this imposition is justified as a lesser evil. I then address some of the challenges that may arise from implementing a pedagogy of discomfort in classrooms in which some individuals are harmed by the particular unjust social structure under scrutiny. I suggest that two tensions arise from imposing this pedagogy on these individuals. First, subjecting these individuals to the process of critical inquiry appears to reproduce the conditions whereby they are denied status as epistemic agents. Second, the act of collective witnessing through which the process of critical inquiry takes place requires that all participants recognize one another as epistemic agents. However, I argue that this mutual recognition may not be present in classrooms in which some individuals are harmed by the particular unjust social structure under scrutiny. I argue that the presence of these two tensions gives reason for caution when imposing a pedagogy of discomfort on students who are harmed by the particular unjust social structure under scrutiny.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".