Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: Wokeness is mandatory!
First, a little mood music:
Carrying on…
With all the intersectional madness, and “trans” being in vogue, it is easy to forget that the biggest boogieman of the insane Left, especially academia, is White people and their “Whiteness”
“This weekend, more than 14,000 academics will gather in Toronto to share their research for the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference. In past years, I’ve documented the focus of AERA academics on matters that seem only obliquely connected to curriculum, instruction, and policy. It looks like more of the same this year, from the symposium on ‘Liberating Oppressed Ontologies and Cosmologies for Transformational Praxis’ to the paper ‘Queer Evolution: (Re)invigorating Environmental Education through Queer Interpretations of Evolutionary Onto-Epistemological Choreography.’ But this year’s conference has especially lofty ambitions. Under the title Leveraging Education Research in a ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence, the event’s promotional poster features a lighthouse inscribed with the words ‘Trust, Integrity, Methodology, and Reliability,’ which looks out over a sea of ‘Post-Truth, Propaganda, and Fabrication.’
“Unfortunately, rather than a renewed commitment to methodologically sound research into education policy and practice, the conference program demonstrates a preoccupation with promoting a virulent new brand of racism. A keyword search of the conference program reveals 422 hits for whiteness—more than for ‘personalized learning’ (16), ‘school boards’ (19), ‘standardized testing’ (20), ‘high school graduation’ (23) ‘reading achievement’ (24), ‘digital learning’ (25), ‘policy analysis’ (31), ‘early education’ (38), ‘teacher evaluation’ (41) ‘literacy instruction’ (42), ‘bilingual education’ (48), and ‘achievement gap’ (75) combined.
A symposium called ‘The Interrogation of Whiteness in Progressive Public Schools’ promises to explore ‘the experience of teachers and education leaders who work to undo whiteness in public schools.’ A featured paper in that session is ‘Trust, Community, and Dismantling White Dominance.’ Another, ‘Critical-Race Elementary Schooling: Teacher Change Agents are Undoing Whiteness in Elementary Schools,’ celebrates teachers who ‘actively resist elements of Whiteness.’”
