The moral and pedagogical importance of dissent to Catholic education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian Catholic schools sit at the intersection of conflicting interests, most notably those of the Roman Catholic Church, secular provincial governments, local communities, and individual students. In Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest, Nunavut, and Yukon Territories these schools receive full public funding and stand as institutional accommodations for minority interests in Canada. These schools do not exist without controversy, however. The official views of the Church sometimes clash with Canadian law, and all Canadian Catholics do not fully agree with Church teachings on human reproduction, female ordination, marriage, and queer persons. As well, some other Catholic views suggest that the Catholic identity of these schools has been severely eroded by the influences of secular culture. Should students disagree with the prevailing Catholic teaching in these schools there is little or no institutional support for expressing their disagreement in a way that does not lead to a false binary choice between religious and secular norms. This study asks how students who disagree with prevailing Catholic teachings might be taught to express their dissent in a more pedagogically and religiously meaningful way. This study proposes Pedagogy of Dissent as a philosophical framework upon which to base future directions in classroom practice, school administration, and relations between the Catholic school, Church, and student. The framework is grounded in an historical argument that Canadian Catholic schools are exemplars of macro-political dissent from the dominant secular culture, but that they are also the bearers of internal tensions inherent in religious education. The theological argument examines the issues of authority and dissent within Catholic Education. The study then shifts to an original philosophical analysis of the concept of dissent that defines and differentiates it from related concepts like disagreement, opposition, contestation, and resistance. The subsequent discussion of the concept considers and refutes several criticisms of the concept and argues its relevance to educational institutions and relationships. In addition to the historical, theological, and philosophical arguments the study's proposal proceeds from the analysis of interview data from fourteen Catholic high school religion teachers who provide illustrative insights into the current pedagogical tensions inherent within Catholic Schools.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.089 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".