Why is an educator workshop pairing DEI with trauma and adverse childhood experiences?

They all share an agenda to change public consciousness that humans are fragile.

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Tamar Lesure-Owens, workshop leader

Source: New Jersey Education Association
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) held a four-day summer workshop in 2024 on Culturally Responsive Teaching with a Trauma-Informed Lens for kindergarten through fifth grade teachers in Atlantic County. The workshop was funded by local nonprofit the Atlantic County Collaborative for Educational Equity.
 
Who Did This?
NJEA is a public school employee union.
The leader of the workshop, Tamar Lesure-Owens, is a teacher and is involved in NJ-Heart, an activist teacher group that is “Helping educate anti-racist teachers.” Lesure-Owen holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminal Justice with a certificate in African American Studies.
 
The Premise
Day 1 began with an introduction to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as the backbone of the workshop’s intellectual framework—stressful experiences are permanently damaging children’s brain and bodies. This included how perceived racism is transmitted through generations as “historical trauma” in minority communities. 

On Day 2, they explored Jewish studies, the Holocaust, and how to integrate cultural celebrations such as Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa into lesson plans.

On Day 3, a presenter focused on Native American history. Teachers were encouraged “to move away from terms like ‘discovered’ and to reframe history as “the harmful impact of colonization on Native populations.”
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​​On Day 4, Lesure-Owens showed the attendees how she sets up her classroom to emphasize New Jersey’s Underground Railroad history. She demonstrated how to teach math to draw connections to social injustices. 

Lesure-Owens' wrap-up of the workshop stated, “The four-day workshop did more than just train teachers—it transformed them.”

​Analysis
Lesure-Owens’ teachings are consistent with the Leftist progressive ideology of human fragility, i.e., the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Since life experiences can allegedly damage and permanently mold human psyches, then any perceived cultural oppression is a public health crisis.

​​Educators were instructed in techniques for using mindfulness and self-efficacy in their teaching practices to therapize emotionally fragile students and teachers (see adjacent photo).

​Overall, the workshop was euphemistically described as, “In a time when teaching is becoming increasingly multifaceted, educators are searching for innovative ways to connect with and uplift their students.” In reality, the workshop goal was to transform teachers into therapeutic presenters of new interpretations of history and culture, not simply to add a tool to their academic skill sets.

​The turnout was small (see adjacent photo), but that’s commonly a feature of the first step of radical progressive agendas. First adoptees are taught to be vocal and aggressive, and then this leads to administrative policies and then attempts to mandate it for everyone at state (see here, here, here, and here) and federal levels (see here and here).

​Why Did This Happen?
Workshop trainings on ACEs are common across the country, but they are usually public awareness campaigns (see here) and stand-alone workshops (see here and here) that focus only on the public health danger of ACEs. The most noteworthy aspect of this training, however, was how ACEs were tied into the progressive cultural narratives of diversity, equity, and inclusion. If there was any doubt about the underlying motivations behind ACEs, this helps make it clear that ACEs is part and parcel of the radical, neo-Marxist agenda to install a public consciousness. It is anything but a public health campaign based in science. This is cultural transformation, not public academic education.