Woke in the WELS: Ministering in an Age of Diversity: Navigating through Today's Curriculum

 

MLC is at it again - or was at it again: I stumbled on a 2022 Open Learning seminar entitled "Ministering in an Age of Diversity" which ticks all the wrong boxes. Six presentations and at least four of them are deemed worthy of the title Woke in the WELS. Let's dig in!

The first presentation is entitled "Theory to Practice: Navigating Through Today's Curriculum" by Dr. Kari Muente.

We start out with a woke woke wordsalad par excellence:

...it is a continual practice and it is important that we are constantly reflecting on that practice and growing and as our WELS classrooms do become more academically culturally socially emotionally and linguistically diverse it is our responsibility to then go beyond just best practices but engage in evidence-based instruction and curriculum that ensures that all of our students have equal access to the curriculum...

Around the 23 minute mark we are introduced to five philosophies of education ranging from perennialism to Critical Theory:

Critical theory is advertised as

answering educational questions under the idea of solving social problems and social inequality and as a result makes democracy more effective and efficient

Mm-kay. Dr. Muente was asked about which philosophy is most compatible with the Biblical worldview, to which she responds

Good question I think it all comes down to again is where you find yourself in your own camp because from a biblical standpoint again not being a theologist not being a big scholar in those realms of understanding, but from biblical truths the idea is that we want to be spreading the name of sharing God's Word with everyone and making the relationships that we can, and I think when we start looking at some of these philosophies there may be bits and pieces from each of them that may help us address some of the concerns that we have when it comes to building curriculum towards those biblical truths. Because we should be one could argue we could be not only being teaching progressively towards the interests of the of our students to ensuring that all of our students interest us because again if you want to have a student learn you need to connect to the student. So if the student's interest is not involved then how are you going to get that student into meaningful learning but at the same time we do need to be acknowledging that there are some social inequalities that there are some problems in the world and how as a Christian can we then help with those problems and use and build relationships so we can be spreading the word it's a delicate balancing act...

mhmm. This is not the first time we've encountered balancing truth and love, and how it would not be loving to clearly confess Christian truth if it is not what a person is looking for at that time. It might be better to just deal with "social inequalities" instead of biblical Truth. Around the 30 minute mark we are introduced to educational paradigms, and here's where things get batty

So as a constructivist, 

uhh... 

I look at the idea that there are multiple realities that are out there that students have multiple experiences not every experience is the same all lived experiences are valid

Therefore, every blogger thus instructed ... brings out of his treasury new memes as well as old

Constructivism, akshually, is condemned in our shiny new statement on CRT:

Around the 52 minute mark Dr. Muente is asked about incorporating critical theory in the classroom,

As a Christian instructor and teacher, as a social studies teacher, I should be addressing all aspects of history good bad and indifference [sp].

CRT is not an aspect of history; it is a lens. Dr. Muente made this clear earlier in the presentation. 

And it is my responsibility, I do believe that if I have, I should not be hiding things for my students in ways that I could possibly maybe teach about so in other words what I'm saying is critical race theory, ...  diversity comes with race comes with linguistics comes in many different shapes and we need to understand our student's backgrounds. We need to understand the things that they're talking about today, and as teachers we need to help facilitate some of that information. 

So Dr. Muente is saying CRT is a useful tool for facilitating information in an "Age of Diversity." That means she is filtering information through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, intersectionality, white fragility and the like, because she thinks this is good for diverse students. 

This woman teaches WELS teachers. God, I'm glad we homeschool...