From the article: “We’ve been diving into stuff that I will be dealing with in my freshman year of college, and getting deeply into issues of our society,” Meyer told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. “I am a minority in that I have a disability. The course preaches tolerance of all backgrounds. It opens the world to me, not just from my point of view but in understanding the views of others.” Students study speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and invite local community leaders to speak in the class. They are prompted to talk honestly about racism, class disparity, and privilege in their day to day lives at the start of every session. Assignments include analyzing “the way media and society fetishize both women and people of color”. But the provocative discussions that Meyer found so revelatory abruptly ended a few months ago when a female white student accused the teacher of creating an “intimidating educational environment”. District officials have revealed little about the nature of the complaint. The parents who filed the grievance against Greenberg have remained silent about what their daughter found offensive. “Of course, it makes people uncomfortable. The class would talk about ‘white privilege’. I felt uncomfortable, because I did not know the extent of it,” Meyer said to the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Now that he’s taken the class, he said, he’s become aware of the unintentional racism that exists against minorities. Classmate Rachel Livengood, who is also white, added, “The discomfort was with ourselves, not with the class . . . Experiencing discomfort is normal.” The Courageous Conversations curriculum developed by Glenn Singleton invites teachers and students to deliberately push beyond polite conversation in order to get to the heart of controversial and often incendiary issues dealing with social inequities. “An indication that we are engaging in an authentic conversation about race is when people can share their racial truths derived from multiple perspectives,” Singleton said. “The fact that we come to the conversation with diverse racial realities and experiences causes us discomfort.” This is due in part to the fact that many believe racism no longer exists, according to Singleton. Doug Edelstein, a teacher at another Seattle public high school says he worries how it will affect discussions about other controversial topics. “That it will create a chilling effect is an understatement,” Edelstein told The Seattle Times. “Student discomfort will become the arbiter of curriculum.”
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 02:19:39 +0000