Why Queer Inclusion?

In recent years, there has been a growing push among educators toward CRT, or that which recognizes students’ particular strengths in the classroom and leverages them to make learning experiences more relevant and effective.¹ Countering the notion that teachers should cover only what is in the assigned texts regardless of students or context, CRT seeks to explore narratives beyond those that have historically been told in classrooms. It aims to offer a variety of perspectives, experiences, and lenses to students for understanding content.

But one group of students has not yet been explicitly included in the push toward CRT: LGBTQ students. Like most minority groups, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students face a number of challenges in school, not limited to a severe lack of representation and support. In response to these challenges and parallel to the CRT movement, there has been greater focus in recent years on better engaging and supporting queer and trans students. But with little data, few educator resources, and a complicated legal landscape, many barriers still exist.

A 2017 national survey of LGBTQ students from GLSEN paints the picture: When polled, only one in five LGBTQ students reported that they were taught positive representations of LGBTQ people, history, or events in their classes; and more than half (64.8 percent) of students reported that they did not have access to information about LGBTQ-related topics in their school library, through the internet on school computers, or in their textbooks or other assigned readings. At the same time, over a quarter of students (25.9 percent) said their administration was very or somewhat unsupportive of LGBTQ students; and 42.3 percent said they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable talking with a teacher.² Because the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) does not report on gender and sexuality in schools, self-reported data from the GLSEN survey is the most robust information available.

Only one in five LGBTQ students reported that they were taught positive representations of LGBTQ people, history, or events in their classes.

While headlines about queer and trans students point to bullying policies and bathroom laws,³ much of this complicated landscape also has to do with teaching and learning practices.⁴ While more and more inclusive student content has become available in recent years, there remains little guidance for teachers and virtually no time or funding for implementation. In the few instances where schools and districts do have the will and the way to better support queer and trans students, the majority of resources to which educators have access are often similar versions of the same content and almost always student-facing. With so much new curricular content and so few resources to support teachers in teaching it, it is difficult to know where to begin.

Despite this, the picture for LGBTQ students is not all bad, especially compared to just a few years ago, when there was hardly a vocabulary for or recognition of this problem among the majority of education leaders. Where resources from GLSEN, Teaching Tolerance, and others are less well-known, many individual teachers and librarians have taken the work on themselves, creating their own resources. Queer inclusion has grown in recognition around the country, with signs of more districts considering inclusive curricula than ever before—evidence ranging from the existence of books on the subject to Twitter chats for sharing ideas. But three challenges remain: preparing teachers to teach inclusive content and create inclusive learning environments; providing them the resources to do so; and supporting them in these efforts.

The results from GLSEN’s student survey could also be the result of another challenge often unconsidered in educational equity: opaque copyright laws. When, how, and to what extent content sharing is legal can be difficult to understand for folks without expertise in copyright law, and misuse, intentional or not, can come with harsh consequences.⁵ Most of the inclusive resources that exist are student-facing, and all are copyrighted, preventing teachers from sharing resources by, say, copying and pasting sections into their school’s teaching toolkits, even when they are free. These laws also prevent teachers from editing or adapting content to meet their own needs. The result is a growing number of inclusive curricular materials to distribute to students, but very little guidance for teachers looking to teach them, few opportunities for sharing them, and therefore little awareness of the few that exist.

At the same time, with so little data-backed knowledge of LGBTQ students’ experiences and only nascent awareness of the importance of inclusive learning environments, schools and districts put very little focus on supporting educators trying to do this work. Even if teachers like Anna have knowledge of and access to inclusive, adaptable resources, many do not have the support they need from their school administration to take on this work. This complicated web of structural challenges may account for just as much of the barrier to inclusive teaching and learning as does personal bias against the LGBTQ community.

With the push toward CRT has come a wider understanding of the value of representation among educators, in the classroom and in the curriculum, as well as growing popularity of the concept of windows and mirrors. Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita of education at The Ohio State University, first developed this idea in 1990. She suggested that curricula should both offer students a window to lives and experiences different from theirs and hold up a mirror so they can see themselves reflected in the material.⁶ The latter is particularly important for students who belong to one or more minority groups: By no coincidence, students of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ students seldom see themselves reflected or represented in PreK–12 curriculum.

The growing support for cultural competence and representation as corrective action is situated between this single-narrative paradigm—wherein existing curricula teaches through the lens of only one identity—and current knowledge of what it takes for students to succeed. We know that students must feel a sense of safety, respect, and belonging in schools in order to learn.⁷ We know validation from teachers and space to develop inquiry into their own identities is critical to their social-emotional development.⁸ And yet, many schools are falling short of meeting these needs by either failing to address them, or by addressing basic safety instead of pedagogy, rather than both.⁹

Northwestern University Professor Sally Nuamah argues in her book, How Girls Achieve, that educating young girls takes more than simply forging paths in schools that are not designed for them.¹⁰ Rather, it takes active and intentional unteaching of harmful lessons ingrained in them long before they ever arrived in the classroom. It takes teaching specific skills—such as strategy and transgression—to prepare them to navigate a world that relies on their lack of these skills.¹¹ This idea should be extended to reframe teaching and learning for LGBTQ students. Queer students as a group face similar challenges in regard to the lack of representation they see in curricula and the unconscious bias with which they are often taught. Teaching and engaging them will require teachers and school leaders alike to actively unlearn tired stereotypes and interrogate their own understanding of what is normal and given.

Though it may seem like a formidable challenge, queer inclusion does not have to be an all-or-nothing effort. By examining the features of inclusive learning environments and educators' ongoing roles in creating them, and by combining that knowledge with the possibilities inherent in openly licensed materials, innovators can consider new approaches.