Social difference, leadership and career mobility aspirations for elementary school practitioners in Ghana and in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates and analyzes the experiences of elementary school principals and the processes they underwent in their promotion from educator to principal: that is, it interrogates the notion of career mobility in school systems. The purpose of conducting this study was to explore the social barriers that impede the career mobility of aspiring elementary educators, with a specific focus on race and gender. Previous research in the field of mobility and leadership in education has rarely brought together issues of race, gender and identity politics with notions of human, social and cultural capital accumulation. Specifically, studies to date have not identified the impact of race, gender and other social identity intersectionalities in terms of school promotion, and determine what attributes are associated with career success. As a response to these gaps I argue for a model of multiple forms of capital (human, social and cultural) that mediate and mutually constitute one another to produce the simultaneously racialized, gendered, and classed experiences and outcomes of educational career mobility. Using a cross-cultural comparative and narrative methodological approach supported by survey-styled data, in-depth interviews and observations within qualitative research traditions, and using a social, human and cultural capital theoretical framework, the study investigates 15 Ghanaian elementary school principals and 15 Canadian elementary school principals. The principals consulted had varied entry points and access to promotional opportunities. Through this triangular approach of individual interviews, survey-styled data and observations, all supplemented by relevant research, the study provides professional and personal insights to help visible minorities and women educator candidates, and across two distinct cultural/national settings to enhance their understanding of the system, to gain access to higher level positions of school leadership. The Canadian and Ghanaian study participants were of diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, age range, gender, school boards and denominations, and class. Key findings, horizontal mobility is valued in Canada and not in Ghana. Canadian and Ghanaian respondents show reluctance to acknowledge under-representation of visible minority groups/ethnicities in school leadership positions as well as female principals did report delays in career due to family/childrearing. The 'Conscious Career Elevation' model is an agency tool created.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".