The document is chock-a-block with word salad phrases. This is not by accident. This is meant to obscure.
Here are just a few of these phrases. If you look, you can find many more:
- equity minded (framework)
- culturally relevant curriculum
- responsive curriculum
- equity principles
- Eurocentric ideologies
- institutionalized racism
- leaning into the dissonance
(I gotta pause here to quote an entire sentence: "Although there may be challenging conversations in beginning transformative work, addressing the fear and leaning into the dissonance has the opportunity to become a cacophony of discord than can create rhapsody and beautiful new sounds and thoughts." Care to translate that one?)
- colonized mindset
- classified professionals
- the whole student
- diverse representations (in text books)
- culturally responsive practices
- watering up
It's also worth noting that one of the citations in the document is for material on Critical Race Theory?!
Maybe I'm more accustomed to "edu-speak" than you are, but none of this bothers me. What's wrong with having an "equity-minded framework"? Shouldn't we meet students where they are, and give them the tools they need to succeed? Different student groups will benefit from different tools. Recognizing that and providing the appropriate tools is what is meant by "equity". For example, I have students who are hearing-impaired, so I provide captions on my lecture videos. That's an example of providing students with the tools they need to succeed, with an eye to equity. I fail to see the problem with this, nor with "equity principles".
As for the second item, "culturally relevant curriculum" and "Eurocentric ideologies". These are definitely things that an educator needs to be aware of. For example, my state has a (relatively) large Native American population, and we get Native students in classes in our department. If you're teaching History, and only approach the period of "Western Expansion" in U.S. history from an Anglo perspective, all the students will hear is an unbalanced account of American's victorious push westward that ignores what happened to the people getting conquered. History is messy, and we need to teach it in a way (for this example) that talks not only about westward expansion, but about smallpox-infected blankets, tribal boarding schools whose only purpose was to eradicate tribal languages and culture, what amounted to genocide, with the government paying for the scalps of Native Americans, and so on. That is culturally relevant curriculum, and the avoidance of Eurocentric ideologies. Again, I don't see a problem with it.
"Institutionalized racism" is something that I teach in my discipline, and I've explained this to you before. Here is an example, yet again, of what that means in practice. When teaching about why there is such a big, documented, wealth gap between white and black Americans in the U.S., you have to look at the institutions of society and how they were structured in the past, because that structure led to wealth outcomes that we see in the present. For example, after WWII, GIs came back, including black GIs, and tried to use their veteran's benefits to get ahead in society. White soldiers used their education benefits and entered college in record numbers. For black veterans, however, most white colleges did not accept black applicants, and the few all-black colleges that existed were full. Therefore many were unable to use their GI-Bill educational benefits to get a college education, and that had repercussions for their earning power in the years to come. This is because the institution of education was structured to produce different opportunities based on the color of your skin. That's institutional racism, and it's a real thing.
A similar thing happened in housing, with black veterans being technically eligible for the Veteran's Administration Mortgage Program, but being unable to use the benefit to move into a new house in a middle class neighborhood because "restrictive covenants" were the norm. Those are documents attached to the deed of your house saying that you can't sell it to a black person nor to a Jewish person. So even if they did manage to get the down payment for the house, and qualified for a VA mortgage, the benefit was useless because no one would sell a house to a black family. This is part of the reason why residential segregation still persists today; it has its roots in institutional processes that were helping white families get ahead as a group in society, while supressing avenues of mobility for black families. That's institutional racism. Again, I don't see a problem there.
We have recently at my university been sensitized to attend to "the whole student". What does that mean? On our campus, professors are increasingly putting things into their syllabi that address both academic and non-academic student needs, like the phone number for the counseling office in addition to the phone number for setting up tutoring; the location of the campus food bank for students who are food-insecure; and various crisis hotlines. Again, I fail to see the problem.
So what you have here is a list of buzzwords taken out of context that you object to. Maybe it's because you don't know what the words refer to, but I suspect you're either being disingenuous, or putting your own nefarious definitions to the terms. I don't see a problem with any of it. So there's some flowery language--so what? Those of us down in trenches deal with this stuff every day and are already implementing a lot of it. It's not particularly new.
