The Ideology of Access: Young Adult Experiences in Transition from Literacy and Basic Skills to Postsecondary Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Expanding the forms of educational access available is one response to crises in unemployment, housing, migration, pandemics, wealth disparity, and discrimination. Young, racialized, immigrant adults are often the target of efforts to expand access. I analyze the social relations that organize the experience of educational access from the standpoint of young, immigrant, racialized adults in basic literacy programs who pursue transitions to postsecondary education in Toronto, Canada. I argue that access to education entails ideology as young adults are reduced to a fragmented consciousness and reproductive praxis in human capital development that maintains the social and material relations of class struggle. I walk through the journey of registering for, participating in, and exiting access programs from the standpoint of young adults to explicate the relations that organized their reproductive praxis, with special attention directed to the Canadian state. Young adults’ access was mediated by a promise of ‘barrier-free’ participation through Canadian Multiculturalism and the state’s use of competency-based pedagogies and performance management tools, all within the context of under-resourced, publicly funded adult learning. Reproductive praxis emerged as individuals considered going ‘back to school’ when educational access did not resolve the immediate contradictions of their lives. I conclude by considering a transformative praxis for educational access.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".