I’d never heard of this film before, so I watched it on YouTube. My gosh. The editing is so heavy-handed at points it almost plays like satire. If you take the time to Google the “expelled” professors, you will see that the film leaves out a lot of key information. And quotes from ID critics (e.g., Richard Dawkins) are cherry-picked so as to make them seem like dogmatic bullies. So, yeah, this is propaganda, plain and simple.
I can’t imagine using the film as a launch-pad to a broader discussion of evolution with a class of students who are coming to these ideas for the first time.
Just to mention one consideration: to understand what it means to be “fired” or “blacklisted” in academia, you need to know why certain job markets are glutted, what tenure means, what an adjunct is, how searches for the various types of positions are carried out . . . etc. How is the high school teacher going to squeeze all that stuff into a curriculum that is already packed to the gills? How is the high school teacher going to communicate it to a bunch of kids without boring them to tears? And as I say, that’s just one area where the film is deceptive.
The Church does not accept that the universe “just happened.” It accepts the science of evolution. The Church believes that God was the Uncaused Cause.
Intelligent design IS creationism. In the Dover PA court case a few years ago, that was demonstrated. The intelligent design people simply took creationist textbooks and documents, and did nothing more than replace the word “creationism” with “intelligent design”. Literally, that’s what they did, despite asserting that the two were different.
If you need help confronting your school about this, letting them know that the chair of the Committee on Science and Human Values of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (damn that’s a mouthful), supports evolution being taught is pretty compelling evidence. About a third of the way down the page this links to, he says " Catholic schools should continue teaching evolution as a scientific theory backed by convincing evidence." So assuming you are at an American Catholic school, it’s pretty clear what your school should be teaching.
I know you’re not sayi this is correct, but I wanted to point something out. Namely that free speech doesn’t even apply to this. Free speech means the government can’t punish you just for opening your mouth. It doesn’t shield you from professional consequences for what you say. This is important in Academia, because a certain degree of rigor and attention to established fact or theory is important to ensure professors actually know what they are talking about. If a professor wants to spout off a bunch of unsubstantiated stuff in their discipline, that’s muddying the waters and dragging everyone’s work down. Of course they are going to get censured. You can’t just be a scientist and then not practice actual science.