How can teachers teach without being offensive? It happens all the time, even in the seemingly most benign lessons. Educators are often stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to teaching their curriculum. In order to best serve their students and cover the depth in a certain subject matter, they end up crossing into the controversial, especially in science lessons. I had an opportunity to delve into this dilemma during a recent project in my graduate program. I decided to narrow the focus of my inquiry to issues of teaching science curriculum into the debate over teaching Evolution or Creationism. Through my research, I discovered that there is a large component of the population who believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis including that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. This belief becomes problematic when their children learn science lessons in school including Evolution, carbon dating, geology, dinosaurs, the Big Bang theory and other ideas that are associated with origin of the Earth. So what is a teacher to do when they realize that there may be a student in their class who vehemently disagrees with an assertion that dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago when they learn at home that dinosaurs lived side by side with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and even rode on the Arc with Noah, only becoming extinct because of the unfavorable climate conditions after the Great Flood?
Many reasonable people will wonder what we can do better to be more inclusive with our curriculum. For equity’s sake, why can’t we look at all sides of the issue? No one really knows how it all began so why can’t we teach Creationism in conjunction with Evolution?
We took up this conversation as a component of this project. My partner and I presented a series of vignettes to address this very issue. We set the scene in a typical third grade class room with the teacher giving a lesson on dinosaurs. The controversial lesson led to a parent and teacher confrontation before a “school board” (a group of our colleagues) to resolve the issue. The first proposal of the “board” was to teach both ideas to children with the intention that students should be given as much information as possible so that they can come to an educated decision. As the idea to teach both Creationism and Evolutionism came to the floor, the conversation took another turn. Someone brought up the fact that the Judeo-Christian teaching on the origin of life is not the only explanation, and if we decided to teach that understanding we should also include other religious beliefs as well. Many “board members” gave examples of many different creation myths that they knew from their education and indicated that it would be unfair to only teach one.
Where does that leave us? Can it really be all or nothing? One colleague thought it was interesting that she never questioned her education that was vastly different at church and school. She shared that she learned Evolution at school and about the Bible and Creation at church and no one seemed to be bothered by the perceived incompatibility of the two. However, that acceptance of two opposing ideas is often unacceptable to parents who do not want their children taught about ideas with which they do not agree. The argument over what to teach and what not to teach can end up hurting our children, as often the solution is stripping our curriculum down to the lowest common denominator and our children receive a watered down lesson with no real depth.
Our “School Board” decided against teaching both Evolution and Creation in our vignette. The decision was based on the idea that science is an ever growing and changing discipline, and students should be taught the latest scientific theories with knowledge and understanding that they will shift as new evidence supplants old evidence.
Ultimately, science should be taught in schools as an explanation of the world around us and hope that it instills in our children a quest for further knowledge.
We realized that this choice would be unpopular with some families. We also realized that if educators don’t take the time to actively listen to the concerns of the families the result will be a growing faction of people who become disillusioned with the whole educational system. We will become combatants rather than partners in the raising and educating of our children. The idea is not to dismiss all religious influence in schools because by doing so we would also do harm to our children. Some of the greatest works of art, music and literature are born from religious faith. To deny that to our children is just as detrimental as keeping them from the latest understanding of scientific theory. In addition, whether we are parents or teachers we all have the same goal of raising moral and ethical human beings. There exists in all of the world’s religions a standard ethics and morals from which we can all learn and seek to foster in all of our children.
We are all in this together. We want to prepare our young people who are our greatest natural resource for the future. One of the best ways to teach our young people about the future is by showing them their past, and these lessons can come from a variety of sources, and ought not to be offensive.
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