In my first years of teaching I was an occasional teacher in a smaller, rural school board in Ontario. There, supply teachers were assigned 'jobs' based on their qualifications and seniority only. If a math teacher needed coverage, they put their job into the system and the call went out to the occasional teacher with math qualifications who had the highest level of seniority. If they couldn't take the job, it went down the list. In my current board, teachers are able to request a specific occasional teacher to cover their classroom, regardless of qualifications. What tends to happen in practice, is that teachers develop (and only assign jobs to) favourites OR end up calling their colleagues' nephew/neighbour/insert connection here who is a newly-minted occasional teacher. The result is that it becomes difficult for occasional teachers to 'get jobs' if they're not connected to a school. Anecdotally, it seems like this practice must exacerbate the discriminatory hiring practices described by Abawi in this article.

Gloria Ladson-Billings' framework of Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy requires that we ensure students' cultural, linguistic and lived experiences are brought into classrooms and schools in meaningful ways. This has to include MORE than just visual representations and reading material (dare I call it 'low-hanging fruit'?). This comment, and our readings and discussions from the week have me reflecting on how educators can ensure that this happens in ways that have the potential to enact real change.

AND, the administrator gap cannot be closed without disrupting the upper administration gap. In the paragraph above this, they specify principals and vice principals when talking about administrators. If more than 90% of school administrators in Ontario are white - I wonder what that number looks like for Superintendents and Directors.I suspect it is even higher than 90%.

In their article, Lauren Powell's article clearly states that "inclusion is not equity" (p. 3) when discussing the value of co-production in neurodivergent research. Gaudry & Lorenz call inclusion the 'low hanging fruit of Indigenization' (p.220). Across these three articles, we see authors calling out surface-level inclusion and calling for more meaningful change that moves past hiring quotas and addresses the foundational oppressive structures and practices in our institutions.

This comment brings to mind the "Fine Band of Misfits" discussion around the Gaudry & Lorenz article on Thursday, about the colonial strategy of divide and conquer. Saurabh commented about TikTok being used as a platform to connect different groups experiencing similar forms of oppression. This comment is an inspiring example of what is possible when groups can work together to affect change.

This comment surprised me and gave me pause. I wish that the author had cited where he found this 'label', champion of human rights, or at the very least provided more context. Perhaps because of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? It leads me to wonder how exactly we are champions? Who are the champions? Indigenous groups, Japanese-Canadians during WWII, women and 2SLGBTQI+ individuals working in the Federal Government (armed forces and RCMP) and youth with special education needs navigating our public school system all come to mind as Canadians whose human rights are most definitely not being championed. Our readings from this week also suggest this label may be misleading.

I only highlighted part of this quote (to avoid turning the whole article yellow), but this entire section gives me hope! As we discussed in class, AI is very likely here to stay. Zuckerman’s vision of a collaboration between existing LLMs and those that are smaller, built by language and cultural communities could potentially create a more diverse, equitable, inclusive and balanced language learning model used to train our AI systems. This brings me back to the Futures Cone shared in Dr. Stewart’s presentation on Friday, and has me considering what steps we can take towards a preferable AI-related future.

(https://medium.com/the-futureplex/the-futures-cone-and-its-role-in-speculative-design-b01355e296e7)

Zuckerman tells us that Gramsci believes hegemony prevents people from using their imaginations to consider alternative futures. This makes me think of the potential impact of students using AI to do their thinking for them. While I haven’t had an opportunity to do a deep dive into the research, there has been ‘buzz’ in the media about impacts on memory, retention and critical thinking when students use AI in this way. A small study (not peer reviewed) out of MIT showed low cognitive activity when AI was used to complete an essay, compared with students who used a search engine or no tools at all. I’m not claiming AI use causes our neural pathways to disintegrate. Rather I’m imagining a potential parallel between Gramsci’s world, where hegemony caused workers to accept the capitalist ideals, and our own world where offloading cognitive tasks to AI will decrease society’s ability to imagine a better future - and subsequently take action to create it.

This discussion about digitally underrepresented cultures and languages led me to reflect on how American Sign Language and other signed languages from around the world fit into this conversation. ASL is difficult to code into writing. It is visual-spatial and requires 3 dimensions for full expression. How then, can the collective knowledge, culture and stories of the Deaf community find representation in digital spaces and (hopefully) future LLMs?

If you're interested in learning more, here's an article by Laura Brown (author and member of the Deaf community), about the challenges of representing signed languages in writing, https://disabilityinkidlit.com/2017/05/19/asl-writing-a-visual-language/

I love this acronym WEIRD, and I applaud the researchers’ sense of humor in coming up with the name. I think the WEIRD-ness of this issue is further highlighted by Zuckerman’s use of the term ‘Global Majority’. I did a quick search, and the term Global Majority collectively represents people of Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American and mixed-heritage backgrounds, representing about 85% of the global population (Wikipedia). When we consider that these LLMs are made up of online contributions by a Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic minority of somewhere around 15% (or less) of the population, and their outputs are sometimes considered absolute truth without critical analysis by our developing youth - the situation is very weird indeed.

This section of Zuckerman’s text had me reflecting on the students that I’ve taught. Many of these students use AI daily for school work and life advice. In his article, Mishra clearly outlines the challenges presented when students with a limited understanding of both AI use and subject knowledge engage with AI to complete academic work. I wonder about the potential impacts on student identity, sense of belonging or sense of self. Considering the pervasive biases and stereotypes embedded in these LLMs, what happens when a student with an exceptionality uses AI for personal information? What about intersecting identities - a woman with a different hearing level, for example. Could the biases embedded in these LLMs based on the texts that they draw from impact the identity of a young person looking to an AI chat bot for help or support?

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony includes schools, newspapers and other social structures working together to enforce capitalist ideals, creating a society where these ideals are considered to be ‘common sense’. This reminds me of the three logics in contemporary society, discussed by Dr. Stewart on Friday morning. Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony in today’s world feels closely linked to the overwhelming influence (power?) of the logic of business over both media and education. The logic of business in contemporary society feels culturally hegemonic, and the use of big AI in schools without sufficient guidance or policy could further cement the existing inequities in our society between these three logics.