An Iowa teacher who allegedly asked students to “pretend you are black slave” for a writing assignment has been placed on leave by the the school district.
The unnamed teacher in an Iowa City school district posted a four-sentence assignment for students to detail what they would do after they were freed, according to the Iowa Press Citizen. (RELATED: Wisconsin Grad Student Quits Teaching Job After Lying About Being Black)
“Think very, very carefully about what your life would be like as a slave in 1865,” the assignment reads. “You can’t read or write and you have never been off the plantation you work on. What would you do when you hear the news you are free? What factors would play into the decision you make?”
A statement from the district reads in part that it “does not support and will not tolerate this type of instruction.” https://t.co/O3N5okf3uQ
— Iowa City Press-Citizen (@presscitizen) September 18, 2020
A statement from the district’s director of community relations Kristin Pedersen said that the school district “does not support and will not tolerate this type of instruction.”
“The best-case scenario with lessons like this is that students come away with a fabricated lie about history. So, best-case scenario, they don’t really learn anything, or they learn the wrong thing,” Justin Grinage , a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota, told the Press Citizen “Worst-case scenario is that it’s a deeply traumatic experience for students of color, particularly Black students.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot of examples that never hit the public and just take place in classrooms and never get reported as such,” he said.