Comparing Canada's Antigonish Movement and Farm Radio Forum: Economic, Technological, and Social Factors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Antigonish movement and Canada’s Farm Radio Forum were two acclaimed adult education initiatives that helped thousands of Canadians address rural problems in the mid-20th century by promoting self-help initiatives such as cooperatives. The Antigonish movement operated through the St. Francis Xavier University Extension Department in Nova Scotia, during the 1930s and 1940s. Farm Radio Forum began broadcasts in 1941 under the joint sponsorship of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and ran until 1965. Typically, literature presents the two movements as similar examples of a critical Canadian adult education tradition. However, scholars have not, to date, compared them, particularly in terms of how they were impacted by economic, technological, and social factors. Considering the postmodern turn taken by some historians of adult education in recent decades, this dissertation takes a more nuanced historical materialist approach that accepts that many factors interact to produce the historical phenomena we study. The study asks: What can a comparison of the and Farm Radio Forum in terms of how they were impacted by economic, technological, and social factors tell us about the similarities—and differences—between these two adult education movements? iii The comparison was carried out by exploring the economic, technological, and social backgrounds of each movement. Archival and secondary source materials were then examined and analyzed to identify reflections of background factors in the education the movements provided. A focus on education about cooperatives was used to set parameters for the study. The research found that economic, technological, and social factors significantly impacted the purposes of each movement, the choice of topics for discussion, and the tone adopted for presenting information. Most telling among the findings was that the Antigonish movement provided answers to discussion questions, but Farm Radio Forum did not, preferring to let participants arrive at their own conclusions. Many of the differences can be traced back to constraints imposed by the Farm Radio Forum three-party sponsorship arrangement and the often conflicting economic, technological, and social perspectives it embodied. More generally, the dissertation demonstrates the value of a materialist approach to understanding historical developments in adult education. The study supports future research into Canadian adult education history that focuses on economic, technological, and social factors to return the field to its critical tradition.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".