Research and Policy: Doing What You Can: Considering Ways to Address LGBT Topics in Language Arts Curricula

In this column, using a range of theoretical and pedagogical tools, the authors highlight how classroom teachers might make use of multiple approaches to addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) topics in their variously situated classrooms. Specifically, they outline three approaches to addressing LGBT topics through literature, each with its own benefits, drawbacks, possibilities, and risks—including books with LGBT characters, reading “straight” books through a “queer lens,” and queering LGBT-inclusive books. In these ways, the authors hope to help teachers shift the conversation away from what they think they can’t do to what they could do. They want to move teachers from considering if they can include particular lessons or particular texts in their instruction to how they might find multiple, even creative, ways to address the larger systems that enable homophobia and heterosexism in the first place.