Ready to hear what college students, faculty, and staff are learning in their new required diversity course? I'm getting ready to live tweet one right now. This is from a company that has sold into major public university systems, including that one in Oklahoma I was looking for

The course is "heavily influenced by students' perspectives and attitudes" - because what could go wrong when adults just bend the knee to what students want?

The training I'm watching is two years old, so before George Floyd and COVID

The goal of the trainings is to introduce incoming freshmen to the values of the campus and the expectations.

Think about that in the context of what this training does in terms of stifling dissent.

"We want students to have an honest explanation of challenging terms and concepts that we kind of throw around, but we want to make sure students have an understanding of what we mean by power, privilege, intersectionality and different forms of oppression."

"In so doing, we wanted to make sure student voices were incorporated....we wanted to show the lived experiences of students who come from diverse backgrounds with intersecting identities"

They're talking about assessing outcomes from this training, but don't seem to have actually done any work in that regard.

That means assessment will be impossible since they didn't take a baseline before they started doing the training.

They're changing the language from Diversity to Inclusive Excellence

Diversity: Being composed of differing elements, especially the inclusions of different types of people in a group.

Inclusive Excellence: The recognition that an institution's success depends on its diversity

The training introduces key topics to students relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including identify (wonder if they mean identity?), selfhood, power, privilege, oppression, bias, respect, allyship, inclusion, and self care

So what I'm watching is the vendor demo of this course, not the actual course, so they are explaining the concepts that they will teach when the university buys the course.

At the beginning of the course, they have the student self-report how they feel about learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

If I've understood them correctly, the modules in the course actually adapt based on HOW THE STUDENTS ANSWER THIS QUESTION

So the content of the course will be presented differently depending on how open the student is to actually complete the course. If a student answers "I'd rather be doing something else" they will get different content than students who answer "I'm glad to have this opportunity"

Please consider now nefarious this is, for a moment.

They have enough data to know how to change the language of the course depending on how open the recipient is to hearing it.

The course has videos of different "students" (who really look like actors) talking about their different identities. The videos are so cheesy, starting off with the student pretending not to know why they are there and saying they need to leave for work.

They are doing this to try to make the videos seem more authentic I think? But as someone who has made training videos like this, I 100% know that would NEVER make it into the final course unless it's intentionally there.

Yeah this "student" (and I am intentionally not saying gender because I don't know) is wearing lipstick

The course navigation

The identities module "introduces learners to the concept of intersectionality, explaining that we all have a variety of identities pertaining to our race, ethnicity, nationality, class, religion and spirituality, culture, gender, and sexual orientation that make us unique"

They haven't said it, but based on the adaptive nature of the course in the first question, I'll bet you they are using these insights questions throughout the course to continue to adapt the content to respond to how students are answering

I'm not sure I understand how an aspect of a person's identity can conflict with another aspect of their identity, unless we're making the assumption that all people with with a particular identity are the same. But I'm sure they'll explain that.

Yup there it is.

Here they are arguing that a female student who is an athlete may have identity conflict because athletes are supposed to be aggressive and women are supposed to be feminine.

This is literally perpetuating stereotypes.

This is so bizarre.

"It may not always be possible to find harmony when identities are in conflict."

And then it talks about stress management....to use as a coping mechanism for if you can't resolve the conflict?