Ultimate Concern in Teachers' Lives and Practice: A Hermeneutic Inquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this qualitative study I explore the experience of the infinite, eternal, and unconditional in the lives of six Western Canadian public high school teachers, investigating how their sense of what Paul Tillich calls “ultimacy” co-arises with their own particular deep personal interests or practices, and how such interests or practices reflect an ultimate concern in their work as teachers. Each teacher in this study was picked because they possessed some deeply held personal interest that lay outside of their teaching practice, though which also influences their practice in some way. Chapter One details the origins of my own ultimate concern and my passionate interest in the martial arts. I also outline the beginnings of a conceptual framework for thinking about the experience of ultimacy through teacher stories and hermeneutic inquiry. In Chapter Two, I proceed with a review of literature that focuses on key moments in the personal and professional lives of teachers, leading to personal transformation and spiritual insight. In Chapter Three, I introduce my research participants, how I selected them, my methods of data collection, and I elaborate on the philosophy and process of data interpretation in hermeneutics. Because one of the basic tenets of hermeneutic study is that it begins with being called or addressed, I argue that this approach meshes well with the experience of ultimacy, which arrives unannounced and leaves alluring traces that draw us. In this study, such traces are found in text that come from written or spoken teacher stories. The questions which provoked these stories follow William F. Pinar’s four moments of currere. In Chapter Four, I explore the origins of each of the six teachers’ sense of ultimacy and related future intentions, Pinar’s regressive and progressive moments. In Chapter Five, I detail my dialogue with teachers reflecting on the state of their passions or practices with which ultimacy co-arises, and discuss how present challenges prompt analysis, Pinar’s third moment. In Chapter Six, I ask how ultimacy guides teacher Ultimate Concern in Teachers’ Lives and Practice \n practice, which is here seen in terms of Pinar’s fourth moment, synthesis, where past, present, and hopeful intentions for the future come together. Chapter Seven turns to Sosnowska and Zanko’s (2022) article, “Three Kairoi – Three Aions. Paul Tillich, Ultimate Concern and Pedagogy of Radical Hope,” as a frame for situating the findings of this study within a larger contemporary educational and historical context. The study ends with a postscript, Danny’s Story, which reveals one student’s radical hope.
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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 | 0.025 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.084 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".