Does this line of the American Chemical Society recruitment letter sound a little off to anyone else?
Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities enhances your skills to serve a multi-cultural student population.FYI I teach at a "black" college.
I have to assume that Teaching Chemistry to Students with Disabilities is one of their publications, based on the font and capitalization. But that's not actually explained in the letter.
There does seem to be an apples-and-oranges comparison going on, which suggests some sort of underlying thinking that lumps together all the various sorts of students who wouldn't have been in a mainstream college classroom in, say, 1950. That strikes me as especially surprising in a scientific discipline, since, at least in my observation (and perhaps more at the graduate level), a lot of hard-science departments don't really have a majority, at least in terms of ethnicity/national origin, any more.
ReplyDeleteThere is an ongoing conversation both within and about deaf culture, but that's because the deaf have had their own language for 100+ years, and a common language is one hallmark of a culture. Cochlear implants and mainstreaming are changing and perhaps endangering that culture, however. And though there are certainly other communities, perhaps subcultures, made up of people with particular disabilities, it somehow doesn't sound quite right to talk about them under the umbrella of "multiculturalism."
We need an anthropologist, I think. Where's Black Dog these days?
See what you get when you bother to read the crap ACS sends?
ReplyDelete@Beaker Ben: like!
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like ACS is implying that being Black is a disability. Or that being blind is kind of like being Hispanic. Or maybe all multicultural students are, by definition, disabled?
ReplyDeleteFuck.
Higher education is great.
The state of South Dakota apparently believes that American Indian kids are all "special needs," and that those needs aren't things that can be met through fostering by families of the same tribal group. Fun times. (See a recent NPR series)
ReplyDelete