Cracking Open the Literary Canon: Disrupting English Curricula Through Relational Reading
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emerging as a form of pedagogical action research, my study works to develop a reading practice that confronts, rather than ignores or misrepresents, the complex histories of colonialism embedded in the literature that is read in high school English classrooms. Following the research documenting a sustained, disproportionate reliance on the Eurocentric literary canon in English classrooms across Canada, I argue that the way this literature is taught generally leaves students with an ahistorical and narrow worldview that fails to recognize the colonial violence embedded in these narratives. To disrupt this legacy, my project employs Critical Discourse Analysis and Métissage to develop a reading practice I denote as “relational reading.” In developing this praxis, I engage three texts—Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Gale’s Angélique, and Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves—in intertextual conversation. By tracing the sustained impact of these systems of power across texts, I suggest that this study might help re-envision literature education as a means for confronting these violent histories, while helping students imagine how we can work together towards forging anticolonial futures rooted in solidarity, accountability, and reciprocity.
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.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 it