Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the role that educational discourse—in particular standardized practices like province-wide standards and testing—has played and continues to play in the production of student subjectivities. Using the theories of Michel Foucault, I argue that the discursive practices in and around the recent secondary school reforms in Ontario—especially the Grade Ten Literacy Test—have led to the increased categorization of racialized student bodies as marked for educational failure. The 'At Risk' designation that originally sought to identify and remediate students who were at risk of failing standardized tests and not graduating from high school, functions instead as part of discourse that profiles and pre-emptively punishes racialized bodies through techniques of discipline and in the guise of remediation. This research is therefore conceived of as a first step in identifying and understanding the ways in which power relations embedded in the discursive practices of the current education system effectively circulate to produce racialized subjects marked as potential failures. The thesis tracks the emergence of three tiers of 'At Risk' students: those who fail the Grade Ten Literacy Test, those who might fail the test as described in particular by two Ministry documents "Think Literacy Success" (2003) and "Building Pathways" (2003), and those who have characteristics or visual markers that indicate potential risk as described by the early intervention identification tools. The discursive shift from marking bodies based on academic merit or achievement to profiling based on potential failure is significant as it invokes a narrative that school failure is a condition that can be read on the body.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".