How To Make Lessons More LGBT+ Inclusive

 By Holly Youlden

As well as (finally) having some warmer weather, June also brings with it Pride, celebrating the LGBT+ community! Having loved the recent Channel 4 series ‘It’s A Sin’ starring Olly Alexander, I found a recent article in Vice, where Alexander discusses his new book of essays on the future of LGBT+ rights. In the interview, he focuses explicitly on his experiences of homophobia and lack of LGBT+ visibility during his secondary school education, and the impact this had during his early adult life. Going to school is one of the most ‘normal’ things a young person can do, and this reminded me of the important contributions we can make in helping to normalise LGBT+ lives and, as the wonderful Chris Chimonas summarised for me, “creating an alternative narrative to negative stereotypes'' which our young people are often exposed to.

So the next question is how can we, as teachers, use Pride month as an opportunity to celebrate positive images of the LGBT+ community?

As ever at WA, we’re lucky enough to have some excellent examples of what this could look like and how you can make your lessons as LGBT+ inclusive as possible in this month, and beyond! 

Think about subject-specific applications

Chris has put together a fantastic selection of subject-specific examples here to get you started about how you can add an LGBT+ focus to your lessons. Are there any LGBT+ figures you can reference? Is there any LGBT+ historical context that is relevant to what you’re discussing? Could the case study, poem or example you’re using feature characters who are LGBT+? Discussing ideas between colleagues and departments is a great way to get some inspiration. Educate & Celebrate also have a great bank of lesson resources that could be used this month. One example I thought was particularly interesting was this French lesson aimed at high-ability KS4 or KS5 students and our very own English department put together this great set of LGBT+ authors to use in lessons. 

Weave inclusivity into your dialogue

As teachers and tutors, we are used to having conversations with students about a huge variety of topics. In order to ensure that we create the open and inclusive classroom environment we strive for, it is important the language we use is supportive and terms used are correct. Make sure you are confident in your sexual orientation and gender identity lexicon by using some of the very easy resources from Educate & Celebrate here. Think about how you can use a strong understanding of simple definitions to challenge misconceptions from students in a way that demonstrates inclusivity in every conversation we might have in lesson.

Think about the broader curriculum picture

As Charlotte Nicholas (History) mentioned in her recent BLM blog post, one of the bigger challenges is how we ensure we have a genuinely diverse, inclusive curriculum, rather than tokenistic ‘add-ons’. This article talks about how we can move away from stand-alone lessons on an LGBT+ figure and towards creating lessons that challenge heteronormativity using Banks’ tiers of integration. This four-tiered approach offers educators steps to help implement multicultural content as individual courses and programs or, ideally, across the curriculum. 

More ideas for how to support LGBT+ students can be found here. 

Please let us know if you see any great examples of LGBT+ positive activities in lessons as we’d love to hear them!