The Educator's Guide to LGBT+ Inclusion. Kryss Shane
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Before we began this book, let’s take a minute to get really real. One of the biggest questions I find most people ask themselves before attending a conference, listening to a speech, or spending time reading a book is Who cares? For this reason, I will focus this book only on topics when there is a clear answer, not just to Who cares? but also to Why should I care?
This isn’t because I believe you are incapable of making these connections yourselves, but because I recognize that, by the sheer nature of being an educator, each reader is likely to be significantly overworked and very, very underpaid. In many situations, books that are written for people of a profession are written by people who have never worked within that profession. This results in an entire textbook, reference material, or mandated required reading that works well in theory, but which professionals are swift to acknowledge could never work in practice.
This is why this book will be laid out to make it most accessible for you to find the information you need when you need it, and it will allow you to skip entire chapters if they do not apply to the grade level you teach.
Section I offers foundational knowledge, including terminology and frequently asked questions. This will provide all readers with the opportunity to gain or review information, ensuring that they are up to date in current best practices regarding language and research.
Section II provides scenarios that allow readers to try out what they learned in Section I. Scenarios offer opportunities to think through various real-life school situations. Each scenario is followed by questions to answer as well as guidance so that the readers’ answers can be deconstructed, to highlight best practices and to gain further insight into the best ways to meet the needs of the student, student’s family, and/or staff member within the scenario. This section can be utilized individually, in small groups, or as a collective. This is a great way to test yourself privately, to collaborate within teaching teams, or to bring a teacher-training seminar together to turn theory into practice!
Section III turns the hypothetical scenarios into real-life action! This section will guide readers in assessing their own school settings, provide scripts to reach out to supervisors to request to discuss making changes in areas where improvements have been identified, and to make alterations within one’s own control. This provides the opportunity to discover where your school is successful, gives insights into how to work with your supervisors to make your school more LGBT+ inclusive, and offers methods to improve your own classroom, office, or workplace setting.
The goal of this book is not to make a reader become an expert in this field, but rather to provide foundational knowledge that encompasses the immediate needs of the LGBT+ people within your school system, in a way that causes as little disruption to classrooms and schools as possible. Also, lesson plan ideas within this book are intentionally set to require little to no preparation time, and little to no expense to purchase supplies or materials. While a reader is certainly welcome to expand any of the lesson plans provided to be used within more than one class period or to incorporate additional supplies and materials, it is not required.
It is my hope that the information you will read will allow you not just to find implementation opportunities within what you are already teaching, but also that it will help you to understand that the nuances and ways of being mindful of the LGBT+ community can cause benefits to students, staff, family, and the community overall.
Section I
The Foundation:
Terminology and Insights
Section summary
In this section, you will find foundational information related to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, as well as to other communities that are under the “sexual orientation and gender identity” umbrella. This includes considerations of safety, allyship, terminology, and frequently asked questions.
How to use this section
This section can be utilized individually or collectively. If you are reading this on your own, consider your current knowledge base and assumptions before each section, then read on and compare your thoughts with the information provided. This will allow you to spend as much or as little time in this section as necessary based on the insight you already have, correcting your misperceptions and filling in knowledge gaps as you read. If you are reading this in a small group setting, please encourage individuals to take time to think independently, then for the groups to share their thoughts with one another. After, the answers from the book can be provided, allowing all participants to compare their thoughts and the group’s discussion with the correct answers. If the group is large, breakout groups can be assigned to go through this process in a more manageable way, thus allowing everyone the opportunity to share their thoughts and assumptions as they work through the information in this section.
Section take-away
The purpose of this section is to inform the reader, to correct mis-understandings and outdated knowledge, and to prepare the reader with the foundation necessary to best utilize the entirety of this book.
1
Safety
There are currently no mandates of federal protection and this lack of requirements has too often resulted in no legal consideration for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT+) community at all. This means that each state (and sometimes each city within a state) gets to decide whether a person can be discriminated against for being LGBT+. What considerations and protections to provide LGBT+ members of a school community is also left up to specific cities or individual school districts or even individual schools. This can create situations where different schools in the same community may have vastly different rules, policies, and procedures regarding the LGBT+ community. This information is vital to understand so that educators can be mindful of the life experiences of the LGBT+ people with whom they regularly interact.
In some places, there are legal questions and attempts to pass bills to undermine the success of LGBT+ people. These are seen with transgender bathroom bills, with same-sex adoptions, and in situations where a city or state has a clear legal inability to alter a person’s gender marker on their identification paperwork. In other areas, specific cities, school districts, or schools may have created their own policies to ensure safety and inclusion of support in the school experience. When looking into LGBT+ people’s protections or lack thereof specific to your own community, it is essential to consider not just what has happened within your school or school district, but also what is happening in the surrounding communities.
In some schools, there are signs or stickers identifying a school or classroom as a “safe school.” This program has been around for quite some time. The thought behind this, and its goal, is to identify which places and people do not allow homophobic, biphobic, or transphobic language or attacks. When coming out and being out were much rarer, it made sense for the goal to be rooted in recognizing where somebody would not have to hear horrible slurs. In more recent times, however, this is not enough. Now, the most inclusive and welcoming identification is that of being a brave space: a brave-space classroom, or a brave-space office.
This may simply seem to be a change in semantics, but it is not. In a safe space, there is a designation that homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic language and actions are strictly forbidden. In a brave space, it goes beyond this. Experts have realized that while it is crucial to stop horrible things from being said, it is insufficient to stop there. In a safe space, a homophobic statement is responded to by telling the student that this is not acceptable, and ending that type of talk. In a brave-space setting, the conversation is much different. Instead of shutting the conversation down, those in brave spaces encourage further discussion about what has been said or done. Rather than