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Florida professor fired in March for using racial material to teach has sued. [1]
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Date: 2023-05-02
This story was published yesterday in Florida newspapers:
PBAU professor fired over teaching of racial justice files discrimination complaint
Students in Joeckel's class read and analyzed passages about the topic, discussed them and wrote short essays of their own, he said.
Joeckel, who had taught at the 3,700-student Christian school for two decades, said he had long used teachings about racial justice to illustrate his writing lessons.
In February, administrators at the school in downtown West Palm Beach told Joeckel they were investigating a concern raised by a parent that he was "indoctrinating" his students by incorporating lessons about racial justice into his writing composition course.
A former Palm Beach Atlantic University professor fired after a parent complained he was “indoctrinating” students with lessons about racial justice has filed a federal complaint arguing that his termination was racially motivated.
Here is a story from February, before Joeckel was terminated:
I've taught a racial justice unit at a Christian college in Florida for 12 years. Now an angry parent might get me fired.
..a parent called the university president, and apparently the parent used the word "indoctrinating" to describe the unit. And on February 15, the dean and the provost confronted me about it in the hallway.
I posted what I heard from them on Instagram, and my post exploded.
When I went into the office two days later, I got an email in the morning saying the dean wanted to convene a meeting for that very afternoon.
That's never happened before. I've never had the dean contact me for a meeting that would take place that same day.
So when I walked into the meeting that afternoon, I noticed that an HR representative was also present. So I sit down and the dean pulls out the syllabus for my course and just reviews the entire thing. He was going through portions of the syllabus that have absolutely nothing to do with racial justice.
At this point, I'm very confused, because he had said that the concern was that I'm indoctrinating students.
So he asked me questions about my learning outcomes and the measurement of outcomes. And then, when we finally do get to the racial justice unit, he asks me just a few questions that he has in his notes. I could tell that they were prepared questions. I answered the questions, and he basically responded by nodding and saying, "Okay." He asked me one or two follow-up questions. And then we moved on.
He didn't voice any concern during that meeting about the racial justice unit.
But he did seem to focus on and question my pedagogical approaches.
So I walked away from that meeting with the opinion that the university is attempting to make this an issue of my curriculum and my pedagogy, rather than racial justice, as the parent claimed. Because if it was overtly about racial justice, the university would face a lot of controversy and negative attention, and it doesn't want to attract that.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/2/2167065/-Florida-professor-fired-in-March-for-using-racial-material-to-teach-has-sued
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