Professors find racist lessons on popular education website
When the pandemic hit, parents and educators panicked over how children would get an education. Most schools and classes moved online. Overnight, parents transformed themselves into teachers and teachers transformed the way they taught. And together, everyone scrambled for resources and the online education marketplace flourished.
So imagine being one of those parents or educators and stumbling upon a racist history lesson. MLFTC Associate Professors Leanna Archambault and Lauren Harris, along with MLFTC alumna and assistant professor at Northern Arizona University, Catharyn Shelton, discovered such a lesson on TeachersPayTeachers, a for-profit educational website that allows educators to sell or freely offer the classroom resources they create. Think Amazon for education.
The three were appalled and took to their computers to pen “Lesson Plan Platforms for Teachers Have a Racism Problem,” published in Future Tense, a partner publication of Slate.
Archambult, Harris and Shelton found that the offensive material is not being monitored or promptly removed, but rather profited from by the marketplaces.