Supporting LGBTQ-Inclusive Learning

‘Inclusion’ has quickly become a buzzword in recent years, particularly in the context of classroom diversity, equity, and inclusion. With student demographics shifting rapidly, so too are the learning needs that schools must meet. Education leaders face a growing realization that current classrooms, school systems, and especially learning materials are not designed to serve a wide variety of students.

Broadly speaking, minority students have the same needs as any others: the need to feel safe and supported in school, to be respected by their teachers and peers, and to have the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the curriculum. For minority students, however, schools do not meet these needs by default; meeting them requires intentional efforts that many schools are not making or are unable to make, especially for students of gender and sexual minorities.

The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), which compiles the largest collection of LGBTQ student data in the country, released last week their biannual report— and the results are staggering. Their findings show that LGBTQ students who felt supported and engaged at school were likely to maintain higher GPAs, less likely to have missed school in the past month, and less likely to drop out. Unfortunately, 98% of students surveyed reported hearing derogatory remarks at school, including those dually targeted because of other minority identities; 60% reported discriminatory school policies; and 18% were prohibited from discussing or writing about LGBTQ topics. Perhaps most arresting from the report is the fact that these numbers are getting worse: acceptance of LGBTQ students is declining and school policies are becoming more hostile.

As schools start to see these trends play out in classrooms, many are turning to inclusive classrooms as a solution. But inclusivity as an approach, while crucial, presents a unique challenge for queer students. In order to create an inclusive classroom that meets the needs of all students, schools must be able to identify and quantify those students’ needs. To do that, those students must be visible. If schools can’t identify the students they’re trying to serve, they certainly can’t identify the supports they need. But queer students are often not public about the process of coming to terms with their identities, especially at a young age. What’s more, they exist across all other human demographics, and therefore can’t be lumped together under one group that looks or sounds the same. Because of issues around data collection of LGBTQ folks—including safety concerns when self-reporting; changing identities; and institutional bias—many queer students are also unaccounted for in student data.

For these reasons, much of the data that does exist on LGBTQ students, such as GLSEN’s, is self-reported. To compound the bleak outlook for queer students, those in six states (Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas) are subject to “no promo homo” laws. Such statutes prohibit teachers from even mentioning LGBTQ identities in the classroom. Not only then are students told the challenges queer people face are invalid, but they hear this message from the school policies that govern them, the teachers who educate them, and the material they’re taught.

Recognizing the power of inclusive learning material to address this problem, at least two states are exploring solutions through gender-inclusive history and social science curricula. Gender-inclusive, in this sense, is a broad term for curricula and other learning materials that teach about the lived experiences of a wide range of LGBTQ people and identities.

In 2016, California became the first state to pass an inclusive history-social science framework to guide the creation of new textbooks that cover LGBTQ people and people with disabilities. The 2016 vote came after the state’s passage of the FAIR Education Act in 2011, and just this month, teachers in California are using the textbooks for the first time. The publishing process was arduous, in part because it required multiple committees of curriculum experts, history advisors, and LGBTQ advocates to review and revise the new content. The resulting material is groundbreakingly comprehensive and now published in textbooks throughout the state. Unfortunately, however, it’s proprietary and therefore not available to other states looking implement a similar curriculum. What’s more, it will likely not be updated anytime soon, given the cost and process required to do so.

Following California’s lead, the Illinois Senate earlier this year passed a measurerequiring schools in the state to teach LGBTQ history— with one key difference. The proposal in Illinois would require schools to teach a distinct unit on queer history and identities rather than embed this content into existing PreK-12 material. Despite the difference in approach, the measure faced the same challenges as in California: cost, guidance, and logistics. Many states looking to adopt similar curricula don’t know where to find content or implementation guidance, and when they do, the exorbitant cost of printing new textbooks (that quickly become outdated) is prohibitive.

These challenges point to a ripe opportunity for open educational resources. OER are free and openly-licensed teaching and learning materials that can be shared, downloaded and edited by anyone. Unlike proprietary textbooks, OER allow teachers and school administrators to access content for free, tailor it around the specific needs of their classroom, and find guidance for talking about the content in the classroom. This presents a unique opportunity for districts, schools, and educators who want to incorporate gender-inclusive material but don’t know where to start.

Last month, in the New America Weekly, our institution’s magazine, my colleagues and I highlighted EngageNY as a popular example of how to leverage OER to enable more inclusive learning opportunities for students. EngageNY is a digital repository originally created for New York educators (but used by educators around the country) that houses free, editable, and Common Core-aligned material for PreK-12 language arts and math instruction, including scaffolding instructions for English language learners. Though there are currently no similar OER available for LGBTQ inclusion, a strong case can be made for interested states to utilize OER in this way.

This blog series will make that case, exploring ways to leverage OER to create more equitable learning opportunities for all students by incorporating LGBTQ material. As they are now, many schools aren’t equipped to be inclusive of queer students, and a big part of that problem centers on schools’ limited access to high-quality materials. What’s more, lessons that aren’t queer-inclusive offer students an incomplete history and a fragmented understanding lived experiences. OER can and should be a way to address this challenge.

In thinking about the challenges LGBTQ students face in school, it’s easy to identify symptoms of the problem. New data from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) show that queer students in preK–12 are less engaged in school, they’re bullied at higher rates, and they graduate at lower rates than their non-LGBTQ peers. These symptoms should be thought of, in part, as logical results of an incomplete curriculum that does not reflect or validate, and therefore does not engage, queer students.

But even focusing on curricular issues, the problem is broad and increasingly complicated. For educators to teach inclusive material, classrooms must be ready environments. Teachers must be willing and able to adapt lesson plans, class culture must value honesty and respect among students, and schools must be located in jurisdictions with legal protections that allow teachers to cover LGBTQ identities in the classroom. For educators in environments that don’t meet all of these criteria, finding and using inclusive materials can be difficult.

This is not to say, however, that teachers aren’t teaching this content. On the contrary, teachers, school leaders, and even nonprofit organizations around the country are developing their own inclusive lesson plans; they range from mentioning same-gender couples in math problems to covering historical figures in the fight for LGBTQ civil rights. But teachers are developing these lesson plans in lieu of any guidance or standards-aligned, commercial materials. And while some resources are shared across teacher fora or blogs, many are used only by the teachers who created them, in the classrooms for which they were designed. What’s more, teachers who develop or manage to access inclusive lesson plans frequently aren’t prepared to teach the information, and run the risk of using harmful language in attempting to do so.

This lack of broadly-available inclusive learning materials creates a constellation of content and implementation problems among teachers of varying resources and levels of comfort around the topic. These problems fit broadly into two major tensions: creation or curation, and teaching and learning.

If teachers and organizations are creating inclusive instructional materials on their own, is the task at hand to create more of these resources, or to curate the ones that exist? In short, both. Many of the materials that exist are free but not open, meaning teachers can access them at no cost but cannot download, edit, or share them. For example, GLSEN’s collection of inclusive lesson plans is the largest of its kind but is protected under a copyright license that prevents commercial use. Without open licensing, teachers who are able to find resources like these cannot tailor the content to their students or share them with other teachers who might want to use them.

Teachers who create resources themselves do so either because they see an immediate need for these materials from their students, or because they feel a deep personal connection to the content. Content created by non-queer teachers has a greater likelihood of missing the mark in talking about LGBTQ identities and issues. Content created by queer teachers themselves might better deliver the content but doesn’t typically come with “how-to” guides for non-queer teachers looking to use them. Many of the resources that exist already are lesson plans or teacher-facing materials. But even in lesson plans, there is often little guidance on how to introduce lessons on topics like gender identity and expression, or how to use non-binaried language (such as folks instead of ladies and gentlemen, or boys and girls). This begs the question: should creating inclusive curricula start with student learning or professional learning?

Surely, this question asks for an “and-both” solution. Queer-inclusive learning materials that already exist are an important step in the right direction. The next steps are aligning them to state standards, ensuring they’re grade-appropriate, and making them widely available. Enabling even more teachers and school leaders to create their own materials and providing them the tools to teach this content is equally important.

Finally, implementing new curricula will take buy-in from more than just teachers. Both school leaders and LGBTQ advocates—two sets of voices necessary to this conversation—are already strapped for time and resources, balancing competing priorities and existing challenges. Open educational resources (OER) as a long-term solution to queer educational inequity, no matter how convincing, may be a hard sell to those working to address immediate problems for current students.

Openly licensing existing materials and creating new ones—in an easily-discoverable repository—would make it possible for teachers to easily find the resources they need, tailor them to their students, and find guidance on how to use them. It’s especially critical that queer-inclusive content be updated frequently as our understanding of queer identities changes, and OER would allow teachers to do just that. Though it comes with its own set of challenges, leveraging OER for queer- and gender-inclusive curricula remains a prime opportunity for lowering the barriers that queer students face.

With so little data on LGBTQ students, it’s hard to understand the full spectrum of experiences that queer students have in school. Because we know these students show worse outcomes than their non-LGBTQ peers across the board, it’s easy to lump them together as generally disadvantaged, underserved, and underperforming.

But there isn’t just one queer student experience. To the contrary, data from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) point to vastly different school experiences among queer students. The greatest indicator of these differences? Location. Students in southern, rural, or politically conservative states are the least likely to be supported in school or be taught about queer history and identities.

Seven states go so far as to have laws that prevent some teachers from mentioning queer identities at all. These, known among civil rights advocates as “no promo homo” (NPH) laws, prohibit teachers of health or physical education from discussing lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) people or topics in a positive light, if at all. Some laws even require that teachers actively portray LGB people in a negative or inaccurate way. It’s important to note that while these laws technically apply to health education, they’re meant to send a strong anti-LGBTQ message to all students across all subject areas. States with NPH laws are depicted below.

Map courtesy of GLSEN (2017).

According to GLSEN, nearly 9.5 million students in grades PreK-12 attend school in a state with NPH laws. This means that not only are 19 percent of U.S. students highly unlikely to ever learn about LGBTQ identities or history in school, but also that creating inclusive materials in these states—openly licensed or not—would be a fruitless effort. Where teachers aren’t legally allowed to teach the material, legalization of inclusive instructional materials, rather than access to them, is the first step in improving outcomes for queer students. This presents fundamental change in approach to the issue of inclusive instructional materials.

So far, this blog series has explored the challenges and benefits to creating and curating openly-licensed resources that reflect and teach the lived experiences of queer identities and histories. In the schools and districts where educators have the willingness, capacity, and freedom to engage around these issues, this very well may be a useful way to start increasing the number of students who are taught this material.

Meanwhile, the open educational resources (OER) movement, as a whole, is an organic one. It has grown steadily since 2015 with more and more individual districts committing to “going open,” partnering with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Ed Tech to create and share open educational resources. Through creating, curating, and implementing open resources, #GoOpen districts build up environments for high quality, affordable learning.

In states with NPH laws, however, creating inclusive learning materials requires a different, top-down approach. These states must first eliminate state-level laws that prohibit inclusive content before creating or implementing the content itself.

Of the 20 #GoOpen states, two also have “no promo homo” laws. Arizona and Oklahoma both have harmful, anti-LGBTQ laws on the books while actively working to increase access to high quality instructional materials for students.* This contradiction implies that for these states (1) “high-quality” is not synonymous with “inclusive” when it comes to instructional materials, and (2) OER in these states is an effort for some students, not all. In these states—which are both ranked lowest in the country on LGBTQ equality—OER is a way to increase the number of students with access to biased and incomplete curricular content, rather than a way to increase the types of content students can access.

Flipping the script in these states will certainly require overturning NPH laws, and with newly-elected officials like Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, this may be a real possibility. As of now, though, states with no promo homo laws have big hurdles to clear before LGBTQ-inclusivity can really take hold in classrooms. These laws present unique challenges to queer students that aren’t often evident to school leaders or policy makers. And while OER may increase access to instructional materials for students in these states, they will continue to be a vehicle for excluding LGBTQ students while no promo homo laws are in place.

*Update: In April 2019, lawmakers in Arizona repealed the state's No Promo Homo law.

Last month, this blog series explored some of the challenges to OER-enabled pedagogy in states with homophobic education laws. It may be 2019, but seven states still have laws on the books prohibiting teachers from even mentioning LGBTQ identities aloud in the classroom. Two of these states—Arizona and Oklahoma—are also #GoOpen states, which means they are simultaneously working for open learning and against inclusive learning in ways that complicate the landscape for LGBTQ students specifically.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are California and New Jersey, the first two U.S. states to require curricula in public schools to include identities and histories of LGBTQ people and people with disabilities. Through similarly-intentioned but technically-different efforts, these two states are approaching inclusive learning by embedding references to LGBTQ people, identities, and histories into preK-12 history and social science curricula.

Passed in 2011, California’s FAIR Education Act required the contributions of LGBTQ historical figures to be taught in K-12 schools, and paved the way for 2017’s updated History and Social Science Framework. The framework is meant to guide new curriculum, starting in second grade with lessons on diverse types of families, and continuing through high school, with coverage of the gay civil rights movement. It includes events and figures from the Stonewall Riots and the Defense of Marriage Act, to poet Audre Lorde and scientist Alan Turing. The robust nature of the new curriculum is a clear reflection of efforts by state leaders, activists, and community members who provided multiple rounds of input and content guidance. Two years after the curriculum was passed, state leaders are now deep in the costly and arduous process of updating textbooks.

With similar intent, New Jersey became the second state committed to teaching an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum just last month, when it passed a measure to update middle and high school social studies standards. Like California, New Jersey will embed new content into what is already taught in classrooms, rather than require additional units specifically focused on LGBTQ history or identities. This is an important detail, since doing so will likely help normalize, rather than further differentiate, LGBTQ content in relation to other content being taught.

Unlike California, New Jersey will relegate the creation of these new standards to local school boards, leaving inclusivity to the discretion of its 678 individual districts. This means there could be vast differences across the state in what LGBTQ-inclusive learning looks like, which topics are covered, and how they’re taught. Also unlike California, New Jersey will require new standards for middle and high school only, leaving open the possibility for schools to teach LGBTQ civil rights in the upper grades without taking the time in the earlier grades to explain queer identities and why recognizing them is important.

While the new standards are an important step in the right direction, they alone will not be enough to ensure inclusive, high-quality teaching and learning across the state. Getting students to feel motivated and connected to what they are learning requires school systems to develop robust systems of improvement and support that engage teachers and students in meaningful ways. And while both California and New Jersey have ambitious content goals, neither state has clear plans for updating professional learning to prepare teachers to teach this new material.

This is where open educational resources, or OER, may be an especially useful tool—both for student and professional learning. After defining new standards, each New Jersey district will face the same challenge that state leaders in California are currently tackling: updating textbooks. This process will be just as expensive, time-consuming, and logistically complicated for New Jersey, which is not a #GoOpen state, as it has been for California, which is purchasing new proprietary textbooks, despite being a #GoOpen state.

By openly licensing new textbooks, states could save money and share resources with other education systems across the country, making it easier for schools everywhere to access high-quality, inclusive content. OER also has the power to support content adaptation in ways traditional textbooks do not: With the new legislation, California is updating its history textbooks for the first time in 10 years. The content that goes into these textbooks may very well be used to teach students for another 10 years. This is a problem for LGBTQ inclusion specifically because our understanding of these identities and the language we have to describe them change. The country did not understand queer identities or even recognize important moments in queer history a decade ago in the ways it does now. Openly licensing inclusive curricular content would not only prove much more affordable for states, but it would also allow schools and teachers to update and personalize this content as iterative knowledge.

Of course, doing so would put the onus on teachers to not only update content, but to also be prepared with the knowledge to do so. This has a whole host of implications for teacher professional development—for which OER might also be a useful tool—that the next post in this series will explore. For now, it’s encouraging to see two states prioritize inclusive learning and take important first steps toward supporting LGBTQ students. By capitalizing on every available tool, however, the process of creating inclusivity might be that much easier, and therefore more attractive, to other states as well.

Earlier this year, this blog series explored the implications for open learning in the two states with “no promo homo” laws, or those that forbid teachers from mentioning LGBTQ identities in the classroom. Until recently, Arizona and Oklahoma had been the only two #GoOpen states with no promo homo laws, effectively committing to open learning while prohibiting inclusive learning.

That is until last week, when Arizona lawmakers on both sides of the aisle voted to repealthis law, which was encoded in ARS § 15-716 and prohibited teachers from portraying “homosexuality as a positive alternative life-style.” The repeal is a major win for advocates in the state and a crucial first step toward creating safer and more productive learning environments for LGBTQ students.

But it’s only that: a first step. The attitudes and personal beliefs that create laws such as this don’t change overnight, and this repeal doesn’t mean that schools will automatically become inclusive and supportive of queer students. It will take robust, conscious efforts by Arizona state, district, and school leaders to capitalize on the immense opportunity that is now before them: to teach a high-quality, inclusive curriculum that reflects and validates—and therefore engages and serves—all students. Indeed, Arizona is not the first state to contend with this challenge. While California and New Jersey are the only two states to pass legislation requiring this type of inclusion in content, they’re not the only places where education leaders are making an effort to do so. Barring the six remaining “no promo homo” states, school and district leaders across the country must make concerted efforts to create, implement, and scale inclusive curricula if they want to support queer students.

So what exactly will it take to do this? How can state and district leaders in Arizona and beyond support the creation and implementation of queer-inclusive curricula? What can be done to ensure teachers are willing and equipped to teach this material

I. Take intentional steps to make queer inclusive content a priority.

Not only do public attitudes not change overnight, they aren’t always represented by current laws. Just because a state doesn’t formally prohibit teachers from teaching about LGBTQ identities doesn’t mean they will suddenly make this content a priority. Mindsets start with school and district leaders, who must do the hard, ongoing work of understanding the importance of queer identities themselves, and then create time and space to engage teachers around this topic. With many educators already strapped for time, queer inclusivity must be a voluntary priority rather than an extra box to tick. Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, explains some common roadblocks to getting school buy-in, and how to frame the conversation when personal bias are at play. For example, approaching inclusivity as learning about lived realities and identities, rather than as a promotion of those identities, may help some teachers who feel conflicted by personal or religious beliefs.

II. Prepare teachers to teach this content and deliver ongoing support when they do so.

Even when teachers are already on board with this idea, many are not prepared to teach about LGBTQ identities or histories. Particularly those who are not queer themselves, or haven’t before engaged in conversation around these topics, may feel unprepared to do so with students. Professional learning materials may help, but there are very few inclusive materials of this kind, and where they do exist, they’re often proprietary and expensive. Schools looking to better prepare teachers have two options: to create new professional learning materials, or to update current ones. Because both of these options present significant time and cost challenges that many schools don’t have the capacity to meet, many resort to using free materials or taking no action at all. While not as flexible as open resources, free materials are often better than opting out entirely. GLSEN provides some of the most comprehensive educator resources for teaching LGBTQ content, available free online.

III. Adopt OER.

Open educational resources could be a viable option for removing those time and cost barriers. OER are not only free to access, but free to retain, reuse, redistribute, and revise—meaning that teachers anywhere could not only obtain materials to help prepare them to teach LGBTQ-inclusive content, but they could download, share, and tailor those materials to the individual needs of their classroom. The ability to tailor content in particular, which is not possible with materials that are only free and not open, provides unique opportunities for exploring the immense diversity and historical breadth within the LGBTQ cannon. For example, imagine a high-quality, openly-licensed unit for a high school history course covering LGBTQ civil rights. A teacher in New York or Washington, DC could use it to teach about Bayard Rustin, famed leader of the civil rights and gay rights movements. At the same time, another teacher in southern Texas could use it to teach about Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Chicana writer and theorist who chronicled her experiences navigating intersectional identities at the borderlands in Texas. Openly licensing the structure, guidance, and knowledge needed to teach about figures and identities such as these would pave the way for teachers to not just teach inclusive content, but to teach it in an engaging and personal way for students.

The connection between openly-licensed materials and queer equity is not an obvious one. Many OER experts with the tools to help solve the biggest challenges for queer students and educators don’t have queer rights on their radars. At the same time, OER remains largely unknown to many people outside education, including those advocating for LGBTQ students. By capitalizing on every available tool and drawing meaningful connections between these two efforts, leaders in Arizona and beyond could pave the way for a more equitable future for LGBTQ students.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students often have dramatically different school experiences than their peers. In many cases, they face hostility from teachers and students, discriminatory school policies, and have access to very few in-school supports. To compound this, they are never taught material that reflects, represents, or validates their identity. As a consequence, LGBTQ students are less engaged in school, graduate at lower rates, and face much higher rates of mental health conditions than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. Though more and more schools are beginning to recognize this problem, there is little guidance and few resources.

Recognizing LGBTQ-inclusive curricula as a critical step in improving outcomes for all students and especially for queer students, this blog series will explore the possibilities for creating and implementing inclusive learning materials, with a focus on leveraging open educational resources (OER). It will explore how OER, which are designed to be easily updated and shared, could provide a new approach to creating more inclusive learning materials and equitable learning environments.