Prescriptive Partnerships: Black Mothers of Disabled Children and Educators in Ontario's Public School System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study draws on key teachings and principles of Critical Race Theory to examine the experiences of seven Black mothers as they perform as agents on behalf of their children who are enrolled in the special education environments in elementary schools across the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, Canada. This qualitative study uses techniques of constructivism and bricolage as it disrupts normalized, hegemonic approaches to parental engagement. The Black mothers’ voices are foregrounded as they share their experiences of engagement with, and disengagement by, members of the in-school team (including educators and health professionals). Critical policy analysis was employed to analyze two Ontario educational policies: (1) parent engagement and (2) special education.This study presents a multi-layered analysis of seven Black mothers as they fight to access special education services; advocate on behalf of their children to get teacher feedback and classwork samples; and negotiate with educators to ensure their children receive timely access to the Ontario curriculum. Notions of power relations between home and school are explored. Black mothers have significantly less power than educators who are all backed by the powerful master legislation, the Education Act of Ontario. This dissertation reveals that educators’ responses to Black students and their parents will vary based upon educator’s values and attitudes, their levels of professionalism, the local school culture as well as the expectations of the district school board and the Ontario Ministry of Education. This study is unique in that through a brief, selective history of Ontario’s general and special education, it investigates the impact of race and racism on Black mothering and mother-work within the special education environment in public elementary schools. Also, by weaving the experiences and perspectives of the seven Black mothers into the analysis of Ontario’s current educational policies, this dissertation shows further how it stands apart: this unique study looks at the role that race and racism play within the discourse of (and discursive practice inherent to) parental engagement within special education environments in elementary public schools in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) of Ontario.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| 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".