Disciplining a working subject: an examination of English curriculum at two Canadian community colleges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines English curricula in two different community colleges, one in Ontario and the other in Alberta during two key periods in Canadian colleges' history: first, 1967–1972, when Canadian community colleges were initially established and then 1988–1994, when colleges confronted the task of restructuring in light of globalization and governments' neo-liberal economic policies. Drawing on post-Fordist and critical theory, primarily that of Michel Foucault's notion of “govern mentality,” the study shows that the Canadian colleges and the forms of English practiced therein were conceived as moral technologies designed to manage the massive influx of baby boom teenagers and growing numbers of unemployed workers that governments confronted in the 1960s. The study develops the notion of “education in/difference” to conceptualize the politics of literary that govern the relationships between colleges, universities and governments. The study examines in detail the class roots of these debates and how they became imbricated into Canadian college English curriculum at these two institutions especially in relation to the reading and writing practices have been articulated in colleges (in)difference to universities. Both colleges' curriculum show that college Englishes are often conflicted subjects torn between imparting cultural and vocational literacies. Moreover, the shift to post-Fordist economies holds some crucial challenges to English education in Canadian community colleges, partly because the meaning of “general education” has bifurcated into generic skills and general education. Despite the major changes in post-secondary education during the last decade, the study argues that the ideology of education in/difference remains intact, posing challenges to college English educators.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".