STEM Discourses and Distinction in An Elite School: Leadership through Relationships to Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) has become an influential discourse in many educational contexts. Despite varied conceptualizations and practices of STEM and STEM education, main goals of these discourses have largely been to support skilled STEM workforce to compete in the global economies. Although there is a plethora of publication regarding STEM education, a still underexplored context for STEM education is elite private schools. The rationale for examining STEM education discourses in elite private schools stems from these schools’ roles in perpetuating the status quo and securing privilege to dominant social groups. They do so by supporting their students to cultivate recognizable forms of capital, a sense of distinction, and entitlement to their privilege. As such, they allow their students to envision leadership roles. Hence, examining how STEM education is conceptualized and practised in these schools can provide understanding of how elite identifications might be facilitated through available STEM discourses and related meanings of excellence and distinction. This is particularly significant when acknowledging that STEM fields tend to have and produce their own status hierarchy. Through critical discourse analysis, this research examines STEM discourses that are available in an elite independent, co-educational, secondary, day school in Ontario, Canada, and how educators in this school conceptualize distinction in and through STEM (education). Using semi-structured interviews with teachers/administrators and document analysis of the school’s website and viewbook, this research further theorizes how these constructs might contribute to elite identifications. This research shows that, in contrast to the narrative of skilled STEM workforce, in this elite school there is an overarching discourse of leadership that defines what distinction in STEM means and what tends to be embraced, rejected and/or recontextualized regarding dominant STEM discourses. Such a leadership discourse subsumes other discourses of impact, intellectual distinction, competitive achievements and active participation. These discourses and related conceptualizations and practices can support students to develop particular “relationship[s] to knowledge” (Bourdieu, 2004) or, more specifically, particular harmonised relationships to STEM knowledge as thinkers, experts and risk-takers, allowing students as such to envision and assume leadership roles and to validate their high status/elite positions.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".