What are the challenges in implementing queer-inclusive curricula?

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.