Positioning the elementary core French teacher: an investigation of workplace marginality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Ontario, core French is a compulsory course until the end of Grade 9. The subject usually begins in Grade 4 and is provided in 20–40 minute daily segments. It has been suggested that teaching French at the elementary level in this fragmented manner puts one at risk for being treated as an outsider, and as a result, increases a teacher's propensity to leave teaching or move away from teaching core French. Drawing on tenets from critical and interpretative traditions and standpoint epistemology, and using qualitative methods, this thesis explores whether there is empirical evidence to support the notion that high teacher attrition rates in elementary core French are associated with elementary core French teachers' systemic marginalization. The thesis reviews the historical background and contemporary context of core French teaching in Ontario as well as relevant literature on teachers' work. Structural and ideological arguments are presented in order to show how elementary core French can be regarded as a marginalized subject. The focus then shifts to how these broader forces play themselves out in everyday life. Using the symbolic interactionist notion that one's identity as teacher is realized, in part, through interaction with other people, elementary core French teachers are asked to discuss how they believe others in the school system—students, teachers, parents, and administrators—see them. The intent was to discover whether or not these teachers regard their identity as compromised or marginal on the basis of these reflected perceptions. Twenty-one participants with a variety of elementary core French experience each took part in a 90-minute, semi-structured interview. The data show that the majority of participants do view themselves as marginal in the teaching community. Yet viewing the elementary core French classroom as a site of oppression is not the only reaction to being positioned as “other.” In some instances participants are able to reorder and subvert established forms of power and thus liberate themselves from their material and ideological subjugation. A typology of responses is constructed. Some practical strategies for dealing with the marginality of the elementary core French classroom are also put forward.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".