What does open learning look like in states with homophobic laws?
Blog Post
Jan. 25, 2019
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.
This is the third post in this series. Click here to read previous posts.
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 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.
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