Historically, prekindergarten–twelfth-grade schools in the United States have not been designed to serve students of gender or sexual minorities. From laws regulating bathrooms and sports to severe restrictions on instruction, policies in many states do not support LGBTQ+ students or teachers. According to a 2019 national survey of LGBTQ+ students from GLSEN, these barriers often translate to lower educational outcomes and graduation rates and to higher rates of anxiety and depression among LGBTQ+ youth.
When polled in the GLSEN survey, only one in five LGBTQ+ students reported that they were taught positive representations of LGBTQ+ people, history, or events in their classes. Well more than half (67 percent) of students reported that they did not have access to information about topics related to LGBTQ+ issues in their school library, through the internet on school computers, or in their textbooks or other assigned readings. At the same time, less than half of students (42 percent) said their administration was supportive of LGBTQ+ students, and 48 percent said they would be somewhat or very uncomfortable talking with a teacher. Because the National Center for Education Statistics does not report on gender and sexuality in schools, self-reported data from the GLSEN survey is the most robust information available.
Compounding general trends, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened mental health of LGBTQ+ students and seen a drastic rise in politicization of inclusive education efforts. A record amount of legislation has been introduced in states across the country that would prohibit or severely limit representation and discussions of LGBTQ+ identities in kindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula and classrooms. In a majority of U.S. states, bills have been proposed that aim to restrict discussions of LGBTQ+ people and their history or create privacy policies that would jeopardize queer students’ well-being, such as in Florida, Georgia, and Texas.
At the same time, a handful of states maintain affirmative laws, requiring kindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula to include accurate LGBTQ+ history. By the end of 2019, four states—California, New Jersey, Colorado, and Illinois—had mandates requiring LGBTQ+ inclusion in prekindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula. The state legislature in New York has recently moved in the same direction. On the opposite end of the spectrum, five states—Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Louisiana—maintain education laws forbidding teachers from portraying LGBTQ+ people or identities in a positive light, if at all. These laws, known as “no promo homo” laws, act in stark contrast with the states working toward statutorily mandated inclusion. Teachers in states with “no promo homo” laws may still work toward engaging and supporting their queer and trans students, but their work necessarily looks different from that in states with supportive legislation.
Stories of this harmful legislation have recently dominated headlines, but LGBTQ+ inclusion is happening and not only at the state level. Just a few years ago, a majority of education leaders were not thinking or talking about queer and trans students. Today, in part because of the steep politicization, school leaders, parents, librarians, media specialists, and more, have taken up the public fight for LGBTQ+ inclusion. Districts in states with restrictive laws are fighting these laws at the local level, through school board elections, local advocacy groups, and even mayoral races. If resistance toward LGBTQ+ inclusion is becoming louder, so too is support from allies, educators, and students. Though these laws affect what educators can and can’t teach, teachers can do many things to facilitate inclusive learning in a variety of political and social settings. The remainder of this profile explores how inclusive teaching and learning look in practice and what barriers exist for teachers doing this work.
Inclusive Student Learning
Inclusion as an approach, although crucial, presents a unique challenge for queer students. 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 likely 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 difficulties in data collection of LGBTQ+ folks—including safety concerns when self-reporting, changing identities, and institutional bias—many queer students are unaccounted for in student data.
For these reasons, much of the existing data on LGBTQ+ students, such as GLSEN’s, are self-reported. Its survey of twenty-three thousand students ages thirteen to twenty-one found that 95 percent of students reported hearing discriminatory remarks frequently at school, 63 percent reported hearing those remarks from teachers or staff, and 17 percent of students were prohibited from discussing or writing about LGBTQ+ topics in school assignments. Students are not only, then, told the challenges queer people face are invalid but 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 materials to address this problem, some states are exploring solutions through gender-inclusive history and social science curricula. Gender inclusive, in this sense, broadly describes curricula and other learning materials that teach about the lived experiences of a wide range of LGBTQ+ people and identities. This can be content focused specifically on LGBTQ+ people and identities or content not focused on them, such as biology and English language arts. For example, an inclusive biology class might use nongendered language or examine the assumptions that we make when classifying genetic phenomena into categories such as natural and unnatural. A biology course that goes beyond simple inclusion to affirming and validating might explore the bias behind what are often regarded as objective, scientific discoveries, a bias that shapes the ways we conceptualize DNA and genetic makeup. A common misconception about queer and trans inclusion is that it is reserved for only certain academic areas and not others. In reality, every subject, topic, and conversation can be made inclusive and affirming. Indeed, all subject matter is shaped by gender and sexuality biases, regardless of whether we are aware of it.
When California passed its inclusive history–social science framework in 2016, it was the first state to make an attempt to guide creation of textbooks that cover LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. The vote came five years after the state’s passage of the FAIR Education Act, in 2011, and textbooks using the framework were implemented for the first time during the 2019–2020 school year. Not only was the publishing process arduous, but the content creation itself required multiple committees of history experts, educators, and advocates to debate the exact content and wording that ultimately went to a vote. The resulting content is groundbreakingly comprehensive and now published in textbooks used throughout the state. Unfortunately, the materials in California are proprietary and therefore not available to other states looking to implement a similar curriculum.
To be inclusive of gender and sexual minorities, student-facing materials must incorporate LGBTQ+ characters, identities, and histories. They should present accurate and impartial information to students about not only what queer and transgender identities are but how they determine privilege and oppression, in addition to describing the implicit biases that help sustain this oppression. Inclusive content can be specifically about LGBTQ+ people or not, but it always includes queer and gender-diverse examples, names, stories, and images.
Teachers and school administrators can take specific steps to intentionally create more inclusive learning environments. As more states move toward inclusive curricula, the need for comparable educator support is growing rapidly. Three of the biggest challenges to inclusion in schools is preparing teachers to teach inclusive content and create inclusive learning environments, providing them the resources to do so, and supporting them in these efforts.
Inclusive Teaching Practices
In recent years there has been a growing push among prekindergarten–twelfth-grade educators toward culturally responsive teaching, or teaching that recognizes students’ particular strengths in the classroom and leverages them to make learning experiences more relevant and effective. Countering the notion that teachers should cover only what is in the assigned texts regardless of students or context, culturally responsive teaching explores narratives beyond those that have historically been told in textbooks. Not to be confused with the current battle over what has been dubbed critical race theory, cultural responsiveness aims to offer a variety of perspectives, experiences, and lenses to students for understanding content.
With the push toward culturally responsive teaching has come a wider understanding of the value of representation among educators, in the classroom and in the curriculum, as well as a 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 offer students both a window to lives and experiences different from theirs and a mirror so they can see themselves reflected in the material. 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 prekindergarten–twelfth-grade curricula.
The growing support for cultural competence and representation is situated between this single-narrative paradigm—in which existing curricula teach 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. We know validation from teachers and space for students to develop inquiry into their own identities are critical to their social-emotional development. And yet many schools are falling short of meeting these needs, either by failing to address them or by addressing basic safety instead of pedagogy, rather than both.
The 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. 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. This idea should also be applied to 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 requires teachers and school leaders alike to actively unlearn tired stereotypes and interrogate their own understanding of what is normal and given.
The term inclusive learning environments has grown more popular in recent years alongside the push for LGBTQ+ acceptance in schools and the movement toward culturally responsive teaching. Inclusive, in this sense, refers to classrooms or other learning environments in which educators, librarians, and school staff recognize their own privilege as starting points for difficult conversations. It also requires that educators be willing and prepared to use affirming language and that they support a variety of narratives that challenge students to open lines of inquiry into cultural assumptions.
When it comes to queer and trans students specifically, an inclusive learning environment is one in which educators take steps to understand straight and cisgender privilege, how it overlaps with other types of privilege, and what dynamic it creates in a classroom. It is one in which educators are open to learning about different identities, so they have context and language to talk about them. It is also one in which educators have the time, space, and school support to understand LGBTQ+ history, at least at a basic level, and how it informs current understandings of queer identities.
Although this all might sound like a heavy load to put on teachers who are already notoriously short on time and resources, the barrier of entry to inclusion work is low. For example, educators can start by making small but intentional changes to the way they address groups of students, by using gender-neutral phrases such as “folks,” “everyone,” or “y’all” instead of “boys and girls,” “ladies and gentlemen,” or “you guys.” This type of change is minimal but meaningful, and it signals to students who do not identify as male or female or are questioning their gender identity that they belong. It also models and normalizes inclusive language for all students, regardless of identity. For smaller content changes such as this, having editable materials, rather than textbooks, can be especially useful.
Inclusive professional learning materials are those that prepare educators to create learning environments in which inclusion is normal and expected. Such resources could be texts on relevant and contextual queer history, an explanation of some of the challenges that queer and trans people face more broadly, or simply information on language, pronouns, and why they matter. Ideally, these resources recognize nuance and diversity within queer communities and engage teachers around intentionally anti-racist queer inclusion. For early and elementary educators, this might be resources that explain the importance of including Black and brown same-sex families in a lesson on family trees. For secondary teachers, it might be adding to the class library foundational writings by Black and brown authors, such as Audre Lorde or Gloria Anzaldúa. Exposure to a diversity of queer ideas and narratives is critical for students, those who may see themselves represented in these stories and those who do not, to disrupt the single-story narrative.
Summary
The disproportionate educational outcomes that LGBTQ+ students face are the result of many compounding factors, such as a lack of representation and support in school, politicization of their existence, and systemic bias. Inclusive materials remain a critical part of the effort to address these challenges and are the focus of an increasing number of efforts. Although teaching and learning are intrinsically tied, it is important to recognize the different needs between student- and teacher-facing materials. Instituting inclusive curriculum laws and policies calls for inclusive professional learning, because if teachers are not adequately prepared, inclusive content will do very little to create more inclusive learning environments.
Key Questions
- What does research tell us about the process of coming out in terms of both gender and sexual identity?
- What is the range of responses to LGBTQ+ youth if they choose to disclose their gender or sexuality identities to family members? How do these responses affect LGBTQ+ peoples’ lives?
- What are the differences between supportive and inclusive schools and those needing improvements?
- What are some health and education disparities for minoritized gender and sexuality identities, and why do they exist?
