Posts tagged lgbtq
Posts tagged lgbtq
Conversations like this (about teachers personalizing classrooms and being allowed to share their interests and talk about their families) never fail to make me think about stories like this (regarding whether queer people are allowed to be “out” at work, especially in certain professions; you can easily imagine a similar story from a teacher’s perspective).
Being able to talk about your family at work is a privilege. We cannot have this conversation without having that conversation.
Thank you. This is hard to get across so succinctly.
(via girlwithalessonplan)
Everyone please read this.
Sorry I’m not sorry, but I want a restaurant that doesn’t donate to bigotry in legislation.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, but I’m not going to give my money to a company that gives some of their profit to such endeavors. I’m also not going to cheer on an athlete that makes racist comments, just like I won’t support an athlete that condones (or commits) violence against women.
Considering the history of the Olympics, and the hostages murdered, I stand by Greece for kicking her off the team. Hopefully she’ll learn a lesson more valuable than winning an Olympic medal. Hopefully it will make people think. Hopefully it will prevent other people from making the same mistake. But above all, this move says, “We as a country don’t condone this,” and I think that’s awesome.
Here’s the thing.
If it was just some guy serving me a sandwich, and I was handing him money so he could eat and put a roof over his head, maybe that’s one thing.
But if I’m giving him money and part of that money is going to people who are promoting something that I find morally reprehensible, guess what?
It isn’t about the sandwich anymore.
What your money goes to matters.
In fact, in a capitalist country like the U.S., where your views are sometimes only as heard as your money can make them loud, where your money goes matters a lot. Yes, we live in a democracy. But our democracy is not only run by our voices, it’s run by our money. Our money speaks for us.
If it was just Joe Somebody on the corner selling me a sandwich, if he was selling it to me along with a mouthful of ideology like Chik-Fil-A’s, my appetite would probably be ruined anyway.
But when your money speaks for you, and the money you fork over for that sandwich is saying “I support what this company is spouting,” it’s not just a sandwich anymore. And if you don’t understand why what we do with our money is important, I suggest you Google “boycott” and “Montgomery bus”…or “Delano grapes”…or, um, “Boston” and “tea.” Sit in on a basic civics class. Something.
Is boycotting Chik-Fil-A the same scope? Probably not, but you never know how something will spread.
And if your craving for a particular sandwich is more important than my rights as a human being, well, let me step off my more civil soap box and tell you how I really feel.
But there’s no TL;DR version, so if you want to ask specific questions and get the short version for those, that works too. My ask box seems to work most of the time.
I received the following in my e-mail today:
Hello PPT!
My name is Matt and I’m currently a pre-service teacher in the Los Angeles area, hoping to go into high school science. I’m currently on a great track at a great university and receiving a lot of praise for my tutoring and teaching as an instructor for SI courses. However, there’s one issue that I’m trying to figure out and I’m not comfortable talking with my education professors about it: my homosexuality.While I’d love to be a good role model for the queer students and be able to talk about such issues openly (even if I am in science, where there’s less room for discussions of those topics), I also have to consider how parents would respond to such openness. I’ve only heard horror stories about how gay teachers are fired, harassed, etc. While I would definitely prefer to be more open about it as to be a good role model, the other side of the coin scares me. While I’m currently very passionate about getting my job and teaching, I’m worried the other side might be too much to handle.My question is what sort of experiences and/or do you have regarding these issues in the field? Is there any advice you could impart on how to deal with these circumstances?Thank you for any response! Feel free to post this publicly on your PPT blog to start discussion if you wish!-MattBefore I begin I need to give two things to the people reading this.One, I still have a horrible migraine, but felt this topic was very important and deserved a timely response.Two, I’m straight, and don’t pretend to represent the GLBT community in any way. I wouldn’t attempt to tell any racial minority how to handle injustices they face, so I am treading carefully on this topic out of respect. If I state anything incorrectly, or insensitively, please let me know.
PPT gives some very good advice here as a prelim of what to consider while you’re considering this issue. I’m just tossing my two cents in as an educator from the LGBTQ group. There’s a lot here because I’m just writing anything I can think of that might be helpful to know beforehand, and please, this goes for everyone, don’t hesitate to ask me more about it or about something I didn’t include.
(Source: positivelypersistentteach)
Patricia Polacco is my hero.
I am going to write an author study/genre study using her books as mentor texts for personal narrative.
She is amazing. The way she speaks about bullying, inclusion, and tolerance is inspiring.
I was a very big fan of Polacco’s work for years, but it wasn’t until looking for children’s books for same-sex parents last year (after almost all of my education coursework was finished and my student teaching was all over) that I stumbled upon In Our Mothers’ House.
That search had become so discouraging. But then I found Polacco. Polacco, a childhood favorite and a favorite again as a teacher, wrote a book with people that looked like me, people that frequently weren’t allowed in classrooms. A children’s book.
I cried and started a fan-letter of thanks and then never sent it because I felt so awkward. But now I might try again.
There are some schools in Virginia — well, many schools in Virginia — looking for teachers. A few of them are in the general vicinity of where a very good friend of mine is moving for HER career. I’ve seriously considered going down there to teach before, and it looks like I would be qualified for the positions, or at least enough to apply.
But here’s the rub:
Virginia doesn’t exactly have a great track record for climate on the whole when it comes to being LGBTQ. The districts have no mention of sexual orientation in their discrimination policies. And I have a very hard time (read: I can’t) keeping silent if I see abuse or bullying going on, even if it’s as simple as the use of the word “gay” in a negative context.
I need to think about this hard before I throw my hat into the ring.
Shifting the Focus From Individual Bullies and Victims to School Culture
While eliminating violent acts is imperative, reducing the concept of a hostile school environment to the acts of individual (troubled) students who can be rehabilitated merely contains and manages the violence, rather than addressing its causes. When the absence of reported bullying functions as the indicator of a safe or inclusive school for LGBTQ students and families, we fail to account for the social processes at work in sustaining the patterns of homophobic bullying and the — subtle, often unintentional — ways schools help to sustain these patterns decade after decade, beginning in the early years of schooling.
We want to challenge the taken-for-granted conceptualization of LGBTQ youths’ school experiences and argue for a broader understanding that encompasses cultural systems of power — specifically along lines of gender and sexuality — that persistently privilege specific groups of youth while marginalizing others. In other words, we need to examine how U.S. culture assumes heterosexuality and traditional gender expressions to be “normal” and “right” and how such values permeate the policies, procedures, and curricula in K-12 schools, making non-traditional gender expressions and sexualities “not normal” and “wrong/bad” or “less than” and thus potential targets.
Shifting the definition of “the problem” in this way demands a different framing of peer-to-peer aggression than that which underlies the dominant bullying discourse. It requires recognition of how patterns of targeting serve the purpose of enforcing strict cultural expectations around gender and sexuality — and how these cultural expectations are being taught and reinforced by the schools themselves. Further, this shift calls for an examination of how aggression functions in youths’ pursuit of social status in elementary, middle and high school.
Because victim blaming isn’t just for rape/sexual assault victims/survivors…
With many things that end up touching on education, I just want to add the usual, “We who have been there have known this (and wished for this) for years, where has the rest of the world been?”
And I don’t say that just as a teacher, but as a student whose heroes were sometimes the teachers who made the very basic but very conscious decision of defending our right to exist.
If you work with young people and have ever been in an environment that was poison to anyone LGBTQ, that works against them, that tells them they are the other, let me reassure you — including them, publicly treating them the same as their peers, acknowledging and speaking up against bullying that can be as basic as name-calling or violence or as subtle as veiled commentary through classroom conversations — these things that seem like they don’t do enough may mean everything.
You don’t need to be a movie hero who rallies loudly and fields death threats and has to fear for their life walking to their car to change the school environment. A few friends and I were talking about this — about the expectations set for people as to what radical change looks like. Radical change is listening to the people you’re trying to help when they tell you what’s wrong, and working with them to act first on that. Radical change is sometimes feeling like you’re standing alone because not everyone can risk the consequences of standing up with you, because people are afraid, because people are tired of fighting every day against the little things. Radical change is sometimes slow, sometimes thankless, sometimes exhausting and sometimes looks and feels at first glance like you haven’t achieved anything.
But it’s also a couple of years from now when you tell someone about the little things that happened before and they’re horrified, because it seems so different from where you are now, and how could that have happened here? It’s the graduating student who makes it through when you were worried they might not, and the incoming students who may not even be able to fully appreciate how meaningful that is. It’s the teacher that feels less like they’re living a double life.
And again, I say this not only as a teacher, but as a student who has been there. Look at the little things in the big picture. And if you cannot find them, ask someone who knows them so intimately that they would be all too happy to have help in changing them.
(Source: sociolab, via transgenderstudentlife)
I’m cosponsoring a GSA next school year. We had a student request one, and he asked if coworkerBFF and I would sponsor it. Admin has “approved” it, in that they can’t NOT approve it. But the principal seems genuinely on board and supportive in that “Oh, really? Cool,” kind of way when I’ve talked…
One of the most successful events that our college GSA had, one that I’d wished I’d thought to do at the high school, was our “family nights.” “Family night” was so-named because at the college level we were very much part of a family of choice in the LGBT student group, building a second family for ourselves, where we could be ourselves, when some of the students could not do the same in any other space.
(A good GSA often follows, to some degree, the Vegas principle — you don’t call out people in the hall, even in a friendly way, who were in the meetings with you, because you never know who that might put in a dangerous or uncomfortable situation. As my first college group president explained, “We know you love each other, just don’t go screaming “YO HOMO I MISS YOU SO MUCH” in the middle of the hall.”)
Family Night is subversive: pizza or potluck, and a movie. The food was free to all because we did it potluck style and made it work on a very limited ($12-$20 a meal for up to 20 people) budget. The fact that people could bring in their own food, and in some instances, cook together (one night we did pancake night with a portable electric griddle) really brought people together in a way that pizza didn’t always do.
The movie was always LGBTQ themed — whether it was a popular movie with an LGBTQ character, an indie film focused on the community, a documentary, a musical, what-have-you. We even at one point got a live performance from a local trans* musician and activist.
And people chatted. Half the time everyone ignored the movie — they were busy broken into clusters having food and talking, making real relationships and bonds. But the people who did watch the movies, often in awe, were most often out straight and cis allies who were just as often very new to the idea, to the community, to the issues. We had a whole group of straight cis folk, new allies — friends from one of the sports teams one of us was on — sit through MILK in stunned silence, cry at the end, and ask if it really happened.
If you can make it an afternoon or evening thing once a month, or every other month, or even just twice a school year, you can also open it up eventually to the community at large, or have one instance where it’s open, IF that’s something that students are comfortable with, because of course it’s about creating their safe space first.
This was the event that actually brought the group together, expanded our membership, and really made us a “family,” which is why I recommend it first — I’ll pass more along when I think of it.
I tried ordering some “safe space kits” for my school for the GSA we’re going to start next year, and there was an error on GLSEN’s site, and I couldn’t get any for my school.
Grr.
This isn’t a safe space kit BUT, if you haven’t hooked up with these folks already,…
This is great! The IYG has vastly improved their website, because this is all new.
GLESN contacted me about the kits so I should get those this summer…when I have 20-40 bucks just lying around. (Unless someone wants to sponsor us! Eh!?)
Depending on the vibe in your town, for the twenty dollars, you might consider something like a bake sale to raise the money. There’s even some very cool instructions out there for making rainbow cupcakes from a box mix and a set of food coloring.
I tried ordering some “safe space kits” for my school for the GSA we’re going to start next year, and there was an error on GLSEN’s site, and I couldn’t get any for my school.
Grr.
This isn’t a safe space kit BUT, if you haven’t hooked up with these folks already, they may be able to supply you with some resources: http://www.indianayouthgroup.org/gsa-info
I would give it a shot — if nothing else, even if they don’t have physical kits for you, they have a statewide network listing to sign up with and may be able to offer school trainings. The local organization on Long Island was absolutely great that way and served as a valuable liaison, role model, and educator to GSAs.
Or you might have found it already. Or (I’m hoping I didn’t make THIS big a faux-pas) they may not even be the right state. But I think I remembered right.
