Emancipatory pathways for adults returning to technical training: the case of continuing college education in Québec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the trajectories of adults returning to full-time study in technical and vocational education and training. The results presented are drawn from a critical ethnography conducted in a General and vocational colleges (referred to as cégep, their French acronym) in Montréal, Québec. The aim of the study was to describe and analyze the educational practices used to support the training and social integration of students enrolled in technical programs in cégep adult continuing education services. This study is based on a document analysis, the researcher's experience, classroom observations and biographical interviews with teachers, active students and graduates. The theoretical framework is built upon andragogy, defined as a humanist and existentialist philosophy of adult education that provides the basis for a critical theory of adult education, aimed at emancipation and self-realization through lifelong learning. The research shows that the transformative learning trajectories of adults returning to school, while highly varied, demonstrate a certain convergence in terms of the elements that drive their return to training. Firstly, before making this choice, they live in a state of low recognition and socio-economic precariousness. Then, dissatisfaction, opportunity and the support of an outsider propels their return to education. This choice is based on the absence of a negative relationship with school, a drive for learning and intellectual stimulation, and a latent desire to return. Finally, favorable socio-economic conditions facilitate the act. The research shows that by giving adults a sense of competence, self-esteem, and a place in society, the success of the academic pathway enables social reintegration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".