Family-tree assignments given to elementary school children don’t always make room for all families. And biology classes may use language and concepts that ignore the full range of genders and relationships found in nature. Here are some ideas for more inclusive alternatives.
Kimmie Fink, at education blog We Are Teachers, explains “Why It’s Time to Rethink Family Tree Assignments.” Such assignments, Fink says, “can feel unsettling and exclusionary” for children who don’t see their families in them. Not only might this impact children with LGBTQ parents, but it could also affect those from multigenerational, step, adoptive, and foster families. “Family tree assignments often require students to research their family history, and that’s just not possible for everyone,” Fink reminds us. Not only is there stress from not being able to complete the assignment, but “The greater harm is the complicated emotions that can come up for students when we remind them of what they don’t know.” Additionally, “Family tree activities can trigger anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder in students with adverse childhood experiences.”
As alternatives, Fink suggests the “Circles of Caring Community” lesson from Welcoming Schools, which looks more broadly at the idea of supportive adults and families, and poem exercises such as “Where I’m From.”*
Slightly older students may also encounter exclusionary language and ideas in biology classes, from “You need a mom and dad to make a baby” to “My textbook says a characteristic ‘goal’ of life is to mate and have biological children,” to “I was taught that everyone is XX or XY,” writes River X. Suh, a nonbinary science teacher and artist, also at We Are Teachers. They share ways of “Talking to Kids About Science in a Gender-Inclusive Way,” drawn from a piece originally published on their website Gender Inclusive Biology, “a resource for teachers who want an evidence-backed, gender-inclusive approach to talking to students about biology.”
Welcoming Schools has long been a go-to resource for creating LGBTQ-inclusive elementary-schools, offering both professional development training and a variety of materials and lesson plans. Gender-Inclusive Biology, which launched last fall, looks like a great new resource (and proof that inclusion and diversity shouldn’t be confined to the humanities; adding LGBTQ people to history and English curricula is great, but not enough). Kudos, too, to We Are Teachers, which is not a site focused on inclusion and diversity, but supports such content among its many informative articles. To these I’d also add Teaching Tolerance, which explores numerous aspects of identity and inclusion. For even more useful sites, books, and programs, see my long list of LGBTQ Back-to-School Resources from last fall. While most of these sites and resources are aimed at teachers, I think it behooves us LGBTQ parents (and parents of LGBTQ kids) to familiarize ourselves with them so that we can advise our children’s teachers if necessary. (And some of the articles from Gender-Inclusive Biology on gender and family diversity in nature are simply fascinating reads.)
What are some good ideas you’ve seen or experienced for making classrooms more welcoming and inclusive?
*Full disclosure: “Circles of Caring Community” is adapted from a lesson plan developed by Emmy Howe of the National SEED Project. Emmy, in a previous role, helped develop the materials that became the Welcoming Schools program, since continued by HRC. I work for Emmy in my day job at SEED. My Mombian work and all opinions on this blog are my own, however.