Critical conversations with K-12 English language teachers: inquiries into social class, privilege, power and agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English language teaching contexts in Manitoba reflect the tensions generated by elements such as poverty, educational gaps due to forced migration, and the role of the education system in the colonization of Indigenous Peoples. In this study, I sought to take a dialogic inquiry as a stance and discuss what impedes or enables educational efforts to address inequities in language and literacy education in the K-12 Manitoba school system. Thus, this research pursued opportunities to challenge normalized views of the status quo and contribute to perspectives of English Language Arts (ELA) teaching and learning that further social change. The objective was to understand what happens when educators are invited to critically engage with texts, concepts, and their own experiences. The topics addressed in them revolved around issues of power, agency, privilege, and social class. In order to carry out this investigation, I conducted initial interviews, a series of three meetings, and final interviews with a group of ELA teachers from Manitoba over a period of three months. This study is informed by theories that highlight power and inequalities in language and literacy education and research, drawing upon critical literacies, decolonial theories, and Bourdieu’s concepts of class, habitus, symbolic violence, and his theory of action. Findings show that collectively engaging with texts, inquiries, and meaning-making with a focus on power generated opportunities to suspend, interrupt, and respond otherwise to understandings, content, and practices that did not align with the teachers’ views of their contexts. Considering that English language teachers are implicated in systems of authority and knowledge informed by colonial understandings, this study advocates for continuous professional learning that critically explores positionalities, identities, places, and literacies that perform and are performed in dynamic relations of power.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".