by Aleana Smiley
The “Multicultural Education” course at the University of Mount Union instructs future educators to incorporate racial and LGBT-focused lessons in their classrooms.
The course aims to help students “[s]elf-reflect and gain sociocultural awareness” and “[e]valuate multicultural education as an instrument of change that promotes human rights.”
However, two students told Campus Reform that they received lower grades because they disagreed with the course’s woke content.
Class of 2024 education major Sammi Orlosky expressed her frustration with the grading process, telling Campus Reform, “I got lower grades on some of my assignments because they were opinion based and not what the professor wanted to hear, even though he asked for our opinion.”
Orlosky is not alone.
Mount Union senior Landon Talbert told Campus Reform, “[The professor] claimed to be open to any sort of opinions when responding to prompts, but any responses that didn’t agree with the author’s points would always score lower.”
According to the university’s course description, students who take the class learn how education is impacted by “race, culture, socioeconomic status, gender, religion, [and] sexual orientation.”
An education major from the university reflected on this class in disappointment, telling Campus Reform “[It] was supposed to teach us about diversity and teaching a variety of students in the classroom, but I draw the line at teaching the ‘gender unicorn’ in my classroom to young children.”
The course kicks off with reading White Like Me by Tim Wise.
According to the book’s description on Amazon, the work explores “the way in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and elsewhere”, and uses “anecdotes instead of stale statistics.”
Continuing the focus on racial relations, the next required text is The School-to-Prison Pipeline by Nancy A. Heitzeg, director of the Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program at St. Catherine University.
In the book, Heitzig criticizes American education under the “current condition of neoliberal post-industrial capitalism”, and calls the paradigm of color-blindness “racism.”
The book Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation aims to make students sensitive to the triggers present for minorities in their everyday lives.
The course’s final assignment asks students “to use the knowledge and experiences you have gained this semester and reflect on your prior personal experiences to develop an 8-10-page personal multicultural autobiography.”
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Aleana Smiley is a sophomore at University of Mount Union. She is majoring in national security and foreign intelligence analysis. Aleana is TPUSA president and campus coordinator at UMU. She is also a Leadership Institute Campus Ambassador.
Photo “Mount Union University” by Mount Union University.
