Teachers in the San Francisco United School District are concerned about race.
In an area where schools are almost 90% non-white, you’d expect that an emphasis on cultural diversity would happen by default, and that teachers wouldn’t need the help of an institutionalized curriculum to get the job done. But in the wake of the Ferguson protests and rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, five teachers from the San Francisco area have teamed up to provide other educators with a guide to teaching about the Michael Brown shooting, the Ferguson protests, and race-based social justice movements.
From the San Francisco Examiner:
Chalida Anusasananan, a teacher librarian at Everett Middle School who helped launch the resource guide, said both incidents and the subsequent protests have hit home with many public-school students in San Francisco, where nearly 90 percent are nonwhite.”We wanted to make sure that teachers had a means to teach what students were talking about with their families, or seeing on the news, or feeling every day,” Anusasananan said.The resources, posted to the SFUSD’s LibGuide page, includes the grand jury documents, poetry, videos and graphics, readings, and lesson plans and activities for elementary, middle and high school students.”What has to happen first and foremost is to create a safe space in the classroom for young people to talk about these things,” said Karen Zapata, a humanities teacher at June Jordan High School and a co-founder of the grass-roots organization Teachers 4 Social Justice. “What’s happened affects young people on an emotional level.”
I took a look at the online curriculum provided by the five teachers, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect to see. I took some screenshots:
Virulent anti-black racism . Extrajudicial killings.
Intellectual honesty means assuming racial intolerance, then?
Killer cops. That’s not biased at all!
The reading list purports to include some interesting…perspectives…on race relations in America, but mostly focuses on why skin color makes us different. My personal favorite is #5:
Everything contained in the curriculum is hyperlinked, so you can click and read for yourself.
As a whole, the curriculum as presented on the site is very “us vs. them,” and I suppose that how individual teachers handle the subject determines whether or not it’s portrayed that way in the classroom.
Is it reasonable to have a resource teachers can go to if they have questions about current events? Absolutely. Is this a fair and balanced resource? Absolutely not.
Keep an eye on your child’s schoolwork, people. This isn’t going to stay within the confines of San Francisco classrooms.
h/t Truth Revolt
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