A critical ethics of reading: Freirean literacy, literacy, and democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to challenge the current direction of Ontario's educational directives, and to offer a participatory social democratic approach as an alternative. I will be specifically looking at an approach to teaching English literacy at the secondary level that focuses on ethics, and that leads to a meaningful democracy, one that involves the opportunity for people to manage their own collective and individual affairs (Chomsky 136). The inspiration for the alternative approach is largely inspired by the spirit and thinking of Paulo Freire. His insight has lead me to understand that literacy is not merely being able to read and write words, nor is it merely syllabification1, nor is it merely the learning of mechanical skills, but literacy is being able to read the word and the world. It is the ability to engage in praxis—reflection and action. Teaching English at the secondary level, therefore, needs to include ethics and the ability to read the word and the world, to be able to understand a reading of the status quo and to be able to challenge it, and thereby transform society. Ultimately, the goal in teaching literacy is the amelioration of society, in part, by striving toward the elimination of discrimination against those who are being oppressed, either due to class, race, sexual orientation, sex, globalization and so on. By a reading of the word and the world teachers need to direct students by engaging them in dialogue and reflection in a comfortable environment where both teachers and students feel free to speak, participate, and learn. The hope in offering this alternative approach is not to offer a “recipe” for teaching English at the secondary level, but to share the gift, understanding, and spirit that Freire's thinking has given to me, with others. I argue that the school system has a vital role to play in this process of empowering our citizens and preparing them to participate in the democratic process. 1Literacy is not just about decoding the written word, but it is intertwined with knowledge of the world.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".