Addressing the Realities of Violent Conflict and Mass Violence through the Curriculum: A Comparative Analysis of Secondary Teachers’ Didactic-curricular Development and Implementation Praxes in Two Canadian Provinces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this comparative, qualitative study was to probe and theorise how secondary teachers’ agency contributed to a curriculum that made historical and contemporary events of violent conflict and mass violence the explicit object of analysis in their classrooms in Ontario and Alberta, and how that positive agency was achieved in particular settings and conditions. Positive agency is defined as teachers’ “creative responses to what they perceive as the constraints or inadequacy of formal curriculum policy” (Bascia et al, 2014: 232).Data from this research suggest that the teachers in this project were highly involved and creative in getting the job done, despite policy complexities and spatial (or material) realms within which they operated, the multidimensionality of their relationships to school stakeholders, and the contextual nature of their actions and gatekeeping. The research sharpens our sense of how teachers, who have traditionally been framed as simply implementors of curriculum created by others, actively navigate and shape policy in their situated settings in sophisticated ways in order to accomplish what they seek out to do. In doing so, my dissertation posits that teachers’ positive agency can be a vital part of the policy process. The analyses illustrate how teachers’ approaches to teaching about violence were adjusted, in real time, to meet students’ emotional and epistemological frameworks regarding the processes, causes, and consequences for particular pedagogical purposes. They illustrate how the teachers adapted, extended, and even transcended written curriculum policy documents in relation to the subject of violence, both individually and by collaborating with expert guest speakers. Lastly, they highlight how various school stakeholders, notably parents and principals, figured into teachers’ curriculum development and implementation, in order to provide a sense of how politicised teachers’ roles may be when shaping the vision, substance, and path of a curriculum that critically analyses and problematizes violence. Overall, this study’s aim is first and foremost to illustrate how teachers’ positive agency contributed to a curriculum that addressed violent conflict and mass violent events and processes, drawing attention, in the process, to the factors that enabled or constrained their ability to manifest and achieve their goals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".