Critical theory and the spectacle of the CAAT program review: a Foucauldian discourse analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs), frequently referred to as the community college system, regularly undergo reviews of the diploma, degree and certificate programs that are offered. This dissertation studies the site of program review as a location for considering language as it is used in higher education, specifically the shift of discourses which originally framed the development of CAATs in Ontario from "access" and "community" to education as product and as driven by economic concerns. The program review offers the researcher a locale for study where many different voices intersect in the consideration of higher education. These voices include faculty, administration, industry and students. The language which is used in program reviews--and which I expand to an understanding of discourse--provides evidence of what we understand education to be in the site-specific location of a program within an Ontario college. The problem identified is the constraint of certain discourses upon our understanding of education in the community college and the absence of other discourses that allow for a fuller conversation about the public role of higher education. Specifically, my understanding of the central problem is twofold: first, education has become viewed as a product of the community college system; second, the neo-liberal ideologies which cause us to consider education as a product also cause us to see people as products of the system. In sum, particular kinds of discourses prevent us from understanding education as serving any purpose other than the fulfillment of economic purposes for the state. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, this dissertation considers the policies shaping program reviews and the language used by reviewers themselves in a single case study of a program review at an Ontario college. The dominant discourses, informed by Foucault's consideration of the juridico-political, economic and scientific manifestations of historic ideologies are identified. Counterdiscourses are also identified as are discourses "in absentia"--those discourses as manifestations of ideology which become marginalized, disenfranchised, silenced or, more significantly, invisible ("unvoiceable"). Finally, this dissertation identifies the role of "problematization" and emanicipatory research potentials to serve more inclusive program reviews.
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 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 | 0.067 | 0.084 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.159 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| 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".