Affirm Gender and Sexual Diversity within the School Community: Most Teachers Want Their Classrooms to Be Safe Places for All Gender and Sexual Identities, but Few Have the Training and Skills to Make That a Reality

LGBTQ people are more visible than ever, particularly in mainstream and online media. More youth are coming out and calling on their communities for positive recognition of who they are and who they are becoming. In this climate of increased visibility, schools and educators are scrambling to understand how best to support those students, and some are seeking help. Here's some of what we know: Schools tend to be unsafe, unsupportive places for LGBTQ youth. Generally, teachers and administrators have little professional development focused on gender and sexual diversity. Preservice teachers move into the field largely unprepared to support LGBTQ students. In this article, we explore what's involved in disrupting those trends and supporting educators to create affirming school communities. High-quality professional development School safety efforts have focused on antibullying and individual educator's attitudes about LGBTQ topics. Supporting educators to challenge homophobic and transphobic attitudes and preparing them to intervene in anti-LGBTQ behaviors is crucial. (Transphobia: intense fear of or prejudice against people who are perceived to defy stereotypical gender norms.) Yet, interventions focused only on bullying do little to transform institutional practices and systems that encourage bullying on the basis of sex, gender, and sexuality (DePalma & Atkinson, 2010). Recently there has been a shift toward examining the web of factors--parent concerns, administrative support, and institutional policies--that influence how educators respond to LGBTQ issues and on building educator's capacities to be affirming toward LGBTQ youth, for example, through curricular inclusion (Greytak & Kosciw, 2014). Findings from recent large-scale studies in Canada (Meyer, Taylor, & Peter, 2014) and the U.S. (Greytak & Kosciw, 2014) suggest that teachers generally want to ensure safe learning environments for LGBTQ youth but say they need more support to make that happen. Teacher institutes Efforts to provide educators with gender and sexual diversity-focused professional development are slowly expanding but still too focused on individuals rather than systems. Though we have worked with hundreds of educators, gaining access to whole-school staffs for sustained periods of time has been difficult. Challenges to develop more systemic professional development include limited resources, state- or district-mandated demands on professional development time, and competing conceptions about the need to devote critical attention to issues facing LGBTQ students. To navigate those challenges, we designed Teacher Institutes that unfold over two, 2.5-hour sessions. Hosted in our School of Education each semester, we invite local teachers, preservice teachers, educational leaders, and teacher educators to participate. To date, we have worked with 115 mainly K-12 classroom teachers from a range of schools. Informed by perspectives on professional development that frame teacher learning as highly social and based in discourse and practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999), our institutes engage participants in knowledge building, critical self-reflection, dialogue, action, and practice. To provide context for our time together, we screen a locally produced documentary Breaking the Silence (Leonardi & Staley, 2015) that showcases a conversation between LGBTQ youth and allies and over 70 preservice and inservice teachers. In small and large groups, we engage participants in discussions that move beyond antibullying to cultivate awareness of how heteronormativity--the system of taken-for-granted norms of heterosexuality and binary gender--operates to silence LGBTQ identities and experiences in school. We support educators to practice taking action through curricula by taking stock of a hypothetical school context. Participants role-play activities so they can rehearse their responses to anticipated concerns of parents and administration. …

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