At the University of Colorado Denver, they’re trying to accomplish equity. Justice and inclusion are also the goals.
Therefore, the school’s issued a manual for students and teachers.
Five-page Syllabus Review Guide For Equity, Justice, and Inclusion enables classes to integrate the three-virtuous virtues.
This document was provided by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
This Syllabus Review Guide aims to aid educators with addressing inequalities, injustices and exclusions of historical and systemic origins that affect students of today.
How does equity, justice and inclusion really work? Whatever it is, the school wants students and staff to become “deliberate” activists:
However [the words]Although they do not share a common meaning, these words typically indicate a recognition and removal of institutionalized barriers or disadvantages.
Professors
This guide provides a starting point for creating syllabi to maximize student success. … [I]It is intended to stimulate reflection and encourage lifelong efforts for equity, justice and inclusion on the campus and at home.
No matter what subject they are teaching, the instructors must shift focus to social engineering. That’s an unavoidable trade, given that time and energy are finite.
CU Denver hails six practices “designed to help all students, but especially minoritized students, be more successful in their learning”:
- DEMYSTIFYING policies and practices in colleges
- FELLOWING and creating an environment in which students feel comfortable and where their cultures are respected
- VALIDATING students’ ability to be successful
- CREATING a PARTNERSHIP, where faculty and students collaborate to achieve success
- REPRESENTING various racial/ethnic, gender, sexual, economic, and other backgrounds in assignments and readings.
- DELEGATING dominant norms AND systemic inequities
It’s a curious change. Schooling’s original design went something like this: It’s teachers’ job to tell students what to learn; it’s students’ job to learn it.
It seems that the majority of responsibility rests with instructors. And rather than passing along subject-specific information, they’re tasked with indoctrinating young people into a world view.
In order to do that properly, teachers must adjust their own perspective to that of the state’s.
Take this guide as an example:
Include or refer to CU Denver’s land acknowledgment or an abbreviated portion.
Part:
The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute peoples are honored and acknowledged. This area…was the epicenter for trade, information sharing, planning for the future, community, family and ally building, as well as conducting healing ceremonies for over 45 Indigenous Nations, including the Lakota, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Shoshone, Paiute, Zuni, Hopi among others. … Let us acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from this territory and pay our respect to the diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land. We should also be grateful to the Tribal Nations of this land and their ancestors.
“Acknowledging that we reside in the homelands of Indigenous Peoples,” the example asserts, “is an important step in recognizing the history and the original stewards of these lands. … The United States has worked hard to erase the narratives of Indigenous Peoples over time.”
As has been pointed out before, historians — academics, ironically — say those tribes are not indigenous. They came via the Bering Strait to North America.
Regardless, while the school leads a confession to stolen land, clearly, it isn’t interested in giving the acreage back.
However, identity politics are of particular interest.
You can include readings, activities and assignments to ask students to examine the assumptions they make about minority groups and the advantages and disadvantages that come with them.
In the past, education meant learning skills and facts. Now, it appears, it’s more about falling into line. Accepting a nation full of thieves, and others who are being robbed.
As for students not feeling “safe” in a classroom, in the 1940s, men younger than they stormed Omaha Beach.
Our idea of “safe” has evolved, as has our idea of education.
Do we stand on the brink of the return to the old ways?
Not likely — the old school is a “dominant norm,” now deconstructed.
-ALEX
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