Doing Homework, Doing Best? Homework as a Site of Gendered Neoliberal Governance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores elementary schoolsâ homework practices on Prince Edward Island. I employ a feminist perspective that incorporates Foucaultâs concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1991a) to examine homework as a âsiteâ where institutions (family and school) interact and power circulates. I focus on the ways in which the daily lives and subjectivities of mothers, and to a lesser extent teachers, are organized and regulated in the process of making homework work. \nI assembled and analyzed reports and policies related to education reform, parental involvement and homework. I draw on Foucaultâs approach to genealogy (Foucault, 1984) to examine how homework has been established in these texts as a âgoodâ educational practice for young students, in spite of its dubious effects on educational achievement. Mothers and teachers are explicitly and implicitly addressed in education policy and practice as primary agents for the accomplishment of homework. Following qualitative research methodology, I conducted twenty in-depth interviews with mothers and teachers of elementary aged students. These mothers and teachers often have ambivalent feelings about homework, sharing frustrations about its effects on family time and relations and doubting its value for children. At the same time, âdoing homeworkâ was closely linked to being a âgood mother.â Thus, my analysis draws attention to the complex ways that homework and parental involvement discourses work on and through people, to produce particular kinds of experiences and feelings. While homework may âfailâ to accomplish its professed educational aims for students, I argue that it serves to render women responsible for growing portions of educational labour.\nMy study sheds light on the workings of power in the home/school relationship and more generally on the workings of neoliberal governance and educational reform. \nModern government works through routine administration of our lives, in schools and families, and other institutions, often through persuasion, incitement and engagement rather than through explicit policy. I suggest the daily practice of homework is a concrete example of this and, extending Foucaultâs analysis through feminist perspectives, I explore the unequal operation and effects of homework for those who are its main targets.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it