Baked In Like a Muffin: the Culture of Whiteness in Ontario Elementary Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a newly certified teacher in 2015, I began my teaching journey in the Peel District School Board with limited experience developing my critical consciousness nor recognizing the importance of doing so. I thought teaching students equitably could be achieved by treating all students the same. One of the many issues with this mentality was my positionality as a white female dictated my understanding of equity in the classroom. My subconscious/conscious biases, assessments, resources, expectations of students and teaching strategies were influenced by the culture of whiteness. This influence and perpetuation stems from the socialization of race and colonialism, which has been ingrained into society for centuries (Goldberg, 1992; Feagin, 2013). This translates to racialized students experiencing racism and oppression throughout their schooling, which leads to lower graduation rates and educational outcomes (Carr, 2008; Dei, 2003; Lopez & Jean-Marie, 2021). Upon personal reflection, I see how I reinforced colonial systems in my teaching. This realization drove my desire to deepen my critical consciousness and conduct this work, as I share white intermediate teachers’ experiences reflecting on the culture of whiteness and systems of oppression within schools in the Greater Toronto Area. The following research questions guide this study: 1A) How is the culture of whiteness perpetuated by white intermediate teachers in the Greater Toronto Area? 1B) How does the culture of whiteness impact the pedagogies and resources teachers use in intermediate classes in Ontario? 2) What tools are white teachers using to mitigate the perpetuation of the culture of whiteness and develop their critical consciousness? 3) What changes need to be implemented to mitigate the perpetuation of the culture of whiteness in teaching (i.e., structural, institutional, and/or systemic)? These questions are addressed through data collected from semi-structured interviews that formed a single case study research design. The findings highlight how the culture of whiteness is maintained, tools to deepen one’s critical consciousness, as well as recommendations to disrupt the culture of whiteness in education.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".