In higher education’s ongoing quest to appeal to the “woke” crowd, colleges and universities across the country are now training professors about “inclusive grading” as part of a larger focus on diversity and inclusion.
The College Fix reported that Boise State University (BSU) is the latest in a long line of schools to jump on the ‘inclusive grading’ bandwagon. This week, the university is hosting an event called “Inclusive Teaching Means Inclusive Grading, Too.” The event is part of a larger certificate program, called Boise State Uniting for Inclusion and Leadership in Diversity (BUILD).
Information regarding the event could not be accessed, but other events with the same name offered insight into what is now being taught. From the Fix:
BSU’s event has the exact same name as a previous University of Tennessee-Knoxville faculty workshop. It was aimed to “engage instructors in conversations and activities designed to foreground diversity and inclusion in considerations of assessment and grading practices.”
The University of Michigan held a faculty workshop with a near-identical name as well. The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching stated on its website that attending teachers would “be asked to review their own practices” on grading throughout the event.
This workshop is reminiscent of one held in February at American University, designed to teach faculty “how to assess writing without judging its quality.”
Titled “Grading ain’t just grading” and promising to help teachers rethink “writing assessment ecologies toward antiracist ends,” the workshop warned that “the practices of grading writing” maintained “White language supremacy.”
BSU, the Fix reported, has been on a “woke” kick lately, including hosting a book circle that makes participants “dig deep into ourselves to explore the ways in which we all, as individuals, sometimes unknowingly, support racism and white supremacy.”
The Fix also highlighted other programs coming up as part of the BUILD certification. One workshop is titled “Implicit Bias in the Academic Workplace” and suggests faculty attending reflect on “messages that are fed to us via news and popular culture may cause us to create an inequitable environment.”
Another workshop, titled, “‘Why are You Reacting that Way?’: Unpacking Identity Development & it’s Impact on Interactions in the Classroom & Workplace,” promises to “give participants opportunities to examine the lens they use to interact with others and understand why there is resistance.”
So, it’s now a professor’s responsibility to change their behavior to reduce “resistance” from students? What ever happened to teaching children and young adults how to properly behave?
Another upcoming program asks: “How accessible is your syllabus? That is, to what extent is it able to be used by all intended users, each with differing capabilities?”
Schools across the country have been giving into the woke crowd with increasing frequency. Multiple schools have held “white privilege workshops” designed to teach white people that they are racist and must repent. In one recent example, the University of North Carolina’s workshop was attended by just nine students.
No subject is safe from the woke brigade, either. In Seattle, curriculum has been proposed that would teach students that math – yes math – is racist.