With a student population that is more diverse than ever, educators often face the exciting yet challenging task of creating learning environments that not only accommodate but celebrate the rich differences in backgrounds, experiences and identities of their students.

In this episode of the Educator's Playbook, host Kimberly McGlonn discusses the intricacies and importance of inclusivity and diversity in K-12 classrooms with two Penn GSE experts. She's joined first by Maria Cioè-Peña, a respected education researcher focusing on bilingual and disabled students. Maria's insights, enriched by her extensive research and experience, shed light on adaptive strategies teachers can use to transform their classrooms into supportive spaces where every student's story is acknowledged and valued. Then, licensed clinical psychologist Kyle Schultz shares effective and empathetic tactics that are easy to implement. For example, he explains how teachers can subtly create nurturing, safe spaces by incorporating different signifiers of queer experience around the classroom. Whether it's a pride flag, equality sticker, books, or magazines, the items reinforce that the class is a welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ students and allies.

For more tips on related topics, check out the links to our Playbook story archives below.

GUESTS:

• Maria Cioè-Peña, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
• Kyle Schultz, Lecturer in Educational Practice and Director, Counseling and Mental Health Services Program, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

NEWSLETTER:

• Subscribe to the Educator's Playbook newsletter for ongoing resources and content

RELATED PLAYBOOKS:

• No. 73: Tips to make your classroom more welcoming for all learners
• No. 64: How to be a good parent and a good ally
• No. 63: How to get even better at supporting your LGBTQ+ students
• No. 40: Bringing Restorative Justice into Your Classroom
• No. 39: Putting Black history lessons into action
• No. 27: Respecting pronouns in the classroom
• No. 24: Bringing Gender Consciousness into the Classroom
• No. 21: Creating meaningful classroom discussions
• No. 17: How to confront hate speech at school
• No. 7: Responding to anti-Muslim rhetoric
• No. 5: Treating racial competence as a skill to be learned

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES & RESOURCES:

• María Cioè-Peña receives prestigious 2023 NAEd/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship (05-25-23)
• Penn GSE’s María Cioè-Peña works toward fair and enriching education for all students (01-09-23)

There's so many different ways that diversity comes into play.

This is the Educator's Playbook from the Penn Graduate School of Education. Hi, I'm Kimberly McGlonn. I taught high school English for 20 years in very different districts, one suburban and one urban. However, in that time there was one constant. Each and every student that came into my classroom had their own unique story. Yes, there were things in our backgrounds that connected us, but there were also real differences. When students have experiences, backgrounds, or identities that are so different from our own, it can be really difficult for us as Educator's to navigate building and maintaining relationships no matter how well-intentioned we think we are.

So in this episode of the Educator's Playbook, I'll be sitting down with two experts to talk about things we can do to make our classrooms more inclusive spaces for all of our students. My first guest is an education researcher at Penn GSE, who focuses on the experiences of bilingual and disabled students in the classroom and how we can adapt to create a better, more inclusive learning environment. Maria, welcome to the Educator's Playbook. If you could introduce yourself to our listening audience and let them know what you do.

Hi, my name is María Cioè-Peña. I look at everything that happens at the intersections of racism, ableism, and linguisism, which is discrimination on the basis of language and how that shapes the lived experiences, particularly in schools. And I'm an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education in the division of Educational Linguistics.

I love the ways in which your work sits at this intersection of recognizing that for all of us, we represent more than one identity, and there are all of these things that inform how we read the world and how the world reads us. Can you help us to understand how did you come to focus on that in your journey as a teacher, as an educator, as a researcher, as a scholar?

I do strongly feel like I'm a product of my environment in my community. I was a student in bilingual education from the moment that I immigrated to the US, which is a very fortunate thing, particularly in the nineties. I am a person with a disability, even though I wasn't classified as a student, but my disabilities impacted the ways that I moved in school. And I was a teacher in those spaces and working with children, I was a bilingual special education teacher, so I've worn the hats of the student and the teacher, and then I became a mother and I had a very different understanding of the weight of the responsibilities that are placed on mothers, particularly around education, and particularly for these kids who got these classifications from schools that they may not agree with, that they may not understand, that they may not co-sign. And so I really wanted to explore how does that happen?

How do we end up in situations where kids have multilingual homes but are only speaking English at school, and we're okay with that? How does it happen that then we don't recognize how that monolingualism results in pushing parents out from their kids' lives? How do we then not see that that results in a lack of agency or what we perceive as lack of agency or lack of engagement? And so I really wanted to understand the ways in which lived experiences are also influenced by policy and how policies shape lived experiences in ways that we don't necessarily understand.

Or even see.

Yeah, exactly

I think the hardest thing about deciding the way forward is recognizing what we can and cannot see.

And so we have lots of educational policies which are meant to support learners, but if you're a learner who's at the nexus of multiple experiences, the separation of those policies means in the isolation of your needs, in the isolation of you as a learner, because you're being placed in a special ed classroom or you're being placed in an English learner classroom, and you're never really being integrated into community or having all of your needs met at once. So how do these policies which are intended to be helpful also then result in this harm?

Yeah, the word that comes up for me is othering and the ways in which we make, we create, we co-sign on policies, practices.

And the title of my book is (M)othering Labeled Children. And the M is in parenthetical because then you have othering labeled children in order to highlight the multiplicity of the fact that we are othering these kids, but also their families and their communities as an extension.

Thinking about your living experience, thinking about your research, how do you think schools can actually strike a better balance between the need for specialized instruction and keeping students integrated as a part of the larger school community when sometimes it seems as though both need to happen?

I think we have to think about this in the same way that we're thinking about anti-racist education and liberatory practices. We have to both be building the world that we want to see and we need to be meeting the needs of the students in the world that they are right now. That means thinking about forward planning of integration so that we have integrated classrooms so that we have bilingual ICT, which in my context is inclusive co-teaching, so that you have a general education teacher and a special education teacher, and they're both co-teaching and they're co-teaching linguistically. And we're creating these linguistically expansive spaces so that these kids don't have to decide. If we know that bilingualism is really beneficial for the learning of typically developing or enabled kids, why wouldn't it be helpful for kids who we know need even more educational support? Why wouldn't we want to maximize all of the linguistic resources that they have in their learning environment?

So some of that may look like integrating pedagogical practices into your classroom now rather than just changing the programs that you have. So I've written articles and I've developed this framework called TrUDL, which is a translanguaging universal design for learning framework. And so a way of overlapping how do we make multilingual multimodal access points for students at the teacher level, at the individual level, and then at the collaborative level so that these are ways that we can be creating access in the spaces we have while also thinking about how can we develop better programs in the future.

There's a couple of words that you use that I really think that I'd like for all of us to just sit with. One of them is this notion of what it means to be liberatory and this notion of classrooms as spaces that create a deeper sense of liberation versus disengagement and disconnection, and that sometimes that can come from the space feeling oppressive, where the teacher educator's, is exerting a lot of influence in ways that squashes a personal sense of agency, of a personal sense of self-possession, things that are really important to being able to feel safe. And I think about what you didn't say, which is the word investment. How do we be more thoughtful about how we are deploying our resources and making investments?

Yeah. And how do we create environments that actually respond to students as they are, rather than asking students to make themselves fit into certain settings? I think we just have to recognize that when you have a student who is a multilingual learner, but also classified as a special education student, and we put them in an English only special education environment, we are removing them from resources that they intrinsically have. And so there we are actively using language as a tool of manipulation, but similarly in our monolingual classrooms, we police children's languages all the time. So if you have a bilingual environment where you're telling kids, no, you can't use Spanish during the English time, we're also then silencing children.

So what is the intention? And I understand that in many of these conversations, it's about proficiency, it's about proficiency. What's the goal of proficiency, if not communication? And so how do we create spaces where children can communicate and can create agency and can recognize their own agency, but also understand collaboration and how to make space for other people who have linguistic needs, and how to find ways to communicate when their languages are not shared.

I love how what you're really describing for me is a space that's tender where there's a lot of inward facing tenderness where you're inviting students to be their whole and full selves.

I want teachers to also feel tender. There were moments in my own classroom, and I pull on my practice often to highlight the errors that I was making, the ways in which I was acting against my own interests and values and policing. Kids' linguistic practices was one of them where I would say to kids who would talk to me or communicate a need, oh, I don't understand that right now, you're not speaking in the language that you're supposed to right now. That didn't make me feel good about my practice as an educator. So I also am trying to create space where teachers can feel like they can return to their own intrinsic desires, to also feel seen in their classrooms, to also feel connected with their learners, to create spaces that they would've wanted for themselves.

I think that there are probably listeners, educators who are with us thinking, that sounds wonderful, but given the demands to demonstrate student growth and progress and to maintain a shared conversational space, how do I arrive at that in concrete ways? How do I adapt my lessons, my assessments to really accommodate for these intersectional needs? Do you have any concrete things or some suggestions for how educators can either frame the work or to actually carry it out?

I think one place to start is changing the ways that we communicate and collaborate with parents and really seeing parents as our allies rather than either people who we have to respond to or people who may challenge us, which I know is something that's very difficult right now because there's a lot of noise. I believe that if my students feel seen and heard to the point where they can ask me better questions, where they can feel comfortable telling me, I don't understand. That is going to result in better test scores. And the literature also shows that. And so I think one thing that is happening right now with all of these conversations that are happening at the national scale, it's that it's also taking away from teachers' roles as researchers in their own classrooms, and that teachers have inquiry and that they have expertise and that they can support the choices that they make in their classrooms through literature.

One of my earliest experiences in student teaching was with this woman named [inaudible 00:10:38], who will always in my mind remain as a master teacher. She was a kindergarten teacher. She was allowing translanguaging in her classroom before I knew what translanguaging was. And whenever she was asked a question by the administrators, she would always pull on her literature and say, well, based on these studies and based on this work, this is why this is positive and affirming for my learners. And so I think us returning as teachers to that inquiry space and to that space that we are experts in pedagogy, we are pedagogs, other people are trying to tell us how to do our jobs, but we know how to do our jobs and we learned these things.

And I think we need to not distance ourselves from the research because there has been this conversation in the last couple years that's trying to turn research into elitism, but as a classroom teacher, I was collecting data, I was doing analysis, I was writing reports, I was making decisions based off of that. That's research. And we need to elevate that work that teachers are doing. And I think that that's the way that teachers can be like, how do I do this? You are doing this.

Yeah. And how to defend it. How to make the case that there's legitimacy in decisions.

Return to the philosophy that you learned and that you believe in. So go to your constructivist theory. Think about Vygotsky again, think about play. What is the stuff that brought you to this work? What was the learning that you did along the way? We call on that work because that's what everybody else is doing. The people who are arguing about the test scores, they're pulling on data acting like you don't have it, or you don't have your own literature. You do.

Or access. And you do. I think about teachers and the educators broadly. And one of those places where I feel like culturally we don't have well-developed toolkits is around our ability to recognize and respond to the reality, which is that bilingual students also have different cultural experiences too. How do we remain cognizant? How do we remain sensitive to those backgrounds? Especially when you as an educator, which is often the case, you don't come from them.

Yeah, I think, I know it's really hard to answer these questions and not sound super kumbaya, but I think I really just returned to centering the child and allowing, again, their curiosity about self to really drive a lot of conversations. I think we think of classroom spaces as spaces where children just come to receive, but they come to construct. And what it means to construct is that we're giving them tools, skills, spaces for them to explore these ideas and these concepts, but not necessarily telling them what ideas or concepts to explore. And I think culture is one of those spaces where we feel like we have to teach people about their culture. And so we end up with the folktales and festivals rather than giving space where we can be taught or they can teach or we can co-learn about culture. And so that's the answer that I have to that again. It's just returning to how are we trusting children as learners?

We do have the ability to lean into them as a resource, particularly when their backgrounds do not align with our own, and recognizing that even when they seemingly do, there will be geographic nuances. There will be class associated nuances to how we experience even a single culture.

Look, I'm a Dominican who immigrated from Dominican Republic, but I grew up in Brooklyn, and that's a very different experience than a Dominican who grew up in the Bronx. And I'm in the same family as people who grew up in Brooklyn, and we have different experiences just based on the different parts of Brooklyn. So there's so many different ways that diversity comes into play that it's just easier for us to create space for that diversity to be named, to exist, to flourish than it is for us to try to articulate what that diversity is or should be or how it should show up in our classroom.

How do teachers, how can teachers, how might we, recognize where there's subtlety? What are those other things that you've seen teachers do or that you as a teacher did or that you've read about in your research that really point us in a direction of this is how you capture the subtleties in making your classroom inclusive?

I think returning to unstructured time and spaces is helpful. I think about share time and how share time goes away. The higher up you go on grades, but yet what a fun space that is for children and for learners and how much control they get to have. And we could say, bring us something that makes you feel really whole. Bring us something that makes you feel like it represents your community or your family. And then that starts a conversation and we could turn that into a research project. And all of this leads to something, it can all lead to something. But I think if we don't have the end product set at the beginning, we have so many more possibilities. So yes, we want our students to talk about culture, so let's just create some spaces where they can talk about their culture and really explore that. And we can ask questions.

We can be curious.

And we can be curious. I think that that's really what I'm asking for and thinking about, is creating spaces where kids can be curious for themselves, but also curious of each other and we can be curious of them as well. And the other thing that I would like to see is a return to making mistakes and not being perfect people. I think we really have to recognize that all of the testing has created a culture where it's not about exploring the answer, it's about getting the right or wrong answer. And so much of education and actual learning has nothing to do with the right or wrong answer. It has to do with critical thinking. It has to do with relationship building, it has to do with communication. So how do we really create and lean into those skills and those spaces?

Thank you so much, Maria, for joining me today. Thank you. I really, really, I learned so much and I really feel so comforted about what's possible despite the challenges that I know educators are facing to try to do better about getting this part right.

Yeah. And I just want to say it doesn't have to be radical change. All of this can sound really overwhelming and really daunting, but I just want teachers to start from a place of, even if it's considering rest for yourself, if you're thinking about rest for yourself, then you'll think about rest for your learners differently. If you're thinking about what's going to make me feel comfortable and whole and seen in this classroom, then you're also thinking about what's going to make your students feel whole and seen. So I'm not asking people to change their whole practice or to revolutionize everything in a year, it's just make space for you so that you can make space for your learners and vice versa.

Thank you so much, Maria, for both coming on the show and for that provocative conversation. I'm now joined by Kyle Schultz. In addition to helping train school counselors, he's also a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in working with the queer community. What can we do to make our schools more inclusive to LGBTQ+ students? Kyle, thank you for joining me today. Can you introduce yourself and what you do to our listening audience?

Sure. My name is Dr. Kyle Schultz, and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist by training. I'm also a full-time lecturer of educational practice at University of Pennsylvania's school and mental health counseling program, teaching students who are going into the field of school and, or mental health counseling essentially how to be counselors. And so a lot of my work in teaching is about not only teaching counseling skills related to doing the work, but also how to develop as counselors. And in addition to my doctorate in clinical psychology, I also have a master's in human sexuality. So I'm trained broadly in the area of sexuality as well.

How can, in your view, educators do the hard work of actually creating spaces that are meaningfully inclusive, particularly in these times? How do you go about that?

One of the things that students have brought up in conversation recently is how much do we put on educators to shape our children, our adolescents, our communities, our schools obviously. And so I'm also mindful of recognizing that not everyone can do all of the things, but in terms of talking with teachers about what is it that they can do in their classroom, so much of it I think comes down to how is it that a teacher conveys to their student population, their inclusivity? And I know that we're talking predominantly about queer populations or LGBTQ populations, but I also just think about how does a teacher convey openness to a lot of different sociocultural identities. At a basic level, I think it asks teachers to think about who are their students and how can they address the diversity of experiences that are in one room. And I think that one of the things teaching as a counselor and teaching future therapists, so much of our curriculum is oriented around being self-reflective and asking oneself hard questions.

And even students in my program who are doing this as a job still struggle with coming up against some of their own biases and judgements that they make within any kind of community. And so I think that that work really asks us to consider our own thoughts, values, and biases. And a really important thing that I think that teachers can do that I ask counselors to do as well, is I think that people go into these professions because they want to help, which I very much believe that that is the case. But I think that they also may struggle because they're the good teacher or the good therapist. I tell my students that to be wary of being the benevolent counselor because so often I think that prevents us from really looking at what are the things that we're doing wrong, or that it might be destructive in our work with students or clients that we're working with. So it's definitely about self-knowledge, but what comes with self-knowledge is an openness to really looking at the things that one really needs to work on. And being honest about that.

I also think for a lot of educators, there's this gap where you can think about the culture that you'd like to create, but then there's the micro of how does that actually play out? Is it like how you're grouping students? Is it how you're selecting literature? Is it those pieces? So how do teachers go from that macro awareness to the immediate practice of creating space that's inclusive?

I think that few teachers would say, I don't want an inclusive classroom, but what it does mean is asking ourselves what are the practical implications of these aspirations that we have? And some of the things I talk with students about are how is it that teachers introduce themselves? So something like pronoun usage is very common. Letting students and teachers know that it's okay to talk about those things. And if folks want to share those things, that's totally fine. I think about the way in which teachers include, even in their classroom, different signifiers of queer experience. So whether it's a pride flag, whether it's an equality sticker, whether it's books or magazines in and of itself, provides an environment that conveys to students that that is an okay acceptable thing. It's active on the teacher's part, but it's a passive way of conveying an environment that this is acceptable here.

That there's visibility. Even without a verbal conversation, whether or not you want to talk about it. So I don't have to hear you, but I want you to know that I see perhaps a you.

Yeah.

That you may be fully aware of or questioning or discovering.

Yeah, because I think that sometimes teachers really do think about, I have to ask students really direct questions or I have to engage them in conversation. And one of the things I talk about in my classes is I really think about teaching from an attachment perspective. And attachment is this idea that between parents or caregivers and their child or their infant, that they create a safe, secure bond or space for a child to explore their environment, to explore themselves. And I think about it related to teaching as well. How is it that this teacher is promoting a safe, secure environment for their students to feel comfortable talking about those things if they want to? We can't and shouldn't force kids to talk about things that they're not ready to do.

And particularly with queer youth, many of them may have these thoughts and feelings and won't share them because even if you provide the most secure place for them to talk about it, they're still maybe nervous or scared or worried. Some of them are not out to their own parents. And so we have to keep in mind that providing an environment that demonstrates inclusivity, but again, doesn't force them necessarily to talk about it, is a really great starting point, I think.

Even the idea of on the first day starting with the notion of acknowledging the word pronoun, how much that can signal that you have an awareness regardless of how students choose to disclose or not disclose. It's a way of communicating a positioning, which is one that invites everyone to be able to be whoever, whomever they'd like to be and however that may change. And despite those ways in which I think teachers are making these micro movements in some ways, it's not lost on me that all of the scrutiny of how schools are choosing to handle or avoid conversations about the queer community writ large is probably I would imagine having some kind of impact on the wellbeing, mental health, particularly of students. So what are you discovering about how this larger cultural moment is impacting kids?

Well, I think it has a real serious impact on the development of children and adolescents who are queer because we know that a lack of belongingness, a lack of acceptance, a lack of support is directly related to significant serious mental health issues, suicidality, depression, anxiety, substance use issues. And we know that these things are heightened in queer communities. And I don't think it takes a psychologist to be able to point out that the more we try and shut down conversations about these things or suppress people from talking about them or forbid teachers from talking about them, that it's cutting down actually on the experience of representation and opportunities for students to be able to talk about that openly. And as a psychologist who works with predominantly queer clients, many of them come in very much with issues that have origins, I think, in feeling shame about who they are. And so when I think about their experiences in childhood and adolescence and having spaces that are actively pushing against being able to talk about that, I think about what are we creating down the road in terms of mental health issues.

I think a lot of educators want to figure out this lane, but they find themselves teaching in districts and states where it's not safe to speak openly about things like gender identity or sexual orientation. How can you signify, we talked about this idea of announcing with the use of pronouns that you're a safe person. Do you have other concrete strategies that educators can use to maybe discreetly or just openly say, I am safe?

Yeah. And with some of the things that are going on nationally around don't say gay bills, attempts to prevent trans folks from accessing sports or lifesaving medical intervention, there's at least 10 to 15 states right now that have a ton of different bills in them that are essentially trying to limit even in schools what can be said. So I think actually the first thing that an educator really actually has to do is look at what are the actual laws in my state, what governs what I am, and I'm not allowed to say to my students first and foremost. I think then having conversations with one's administrators about what support or lack of support will I get will allow me then to start to construct what I want to and I'm able to do. Because if you're thinking about educators who are in districts or schools who are very non-inclusive and actually may be quite anti-queer in some of their policies, to ask teachers to start doing things that promote queer student development or health could put themselves in danger of being fired.

And for folks who have those inclinations to make a political statement, that's totally fine, but that's also a privilege to be able to say, I'm not going to work in this space because of this. I also worry then about those schools and how do we have people in those schools still supporting and helping students-

Despite the circumstance and the tensions.

Yeah, because we can't leave them behind. It's still important that we figure out how do we have subtler conversations. So in terms of thinking about that, I think that drawing direction from where will I get support from my administrators around what activities are possible? Because one of the things that often happens in some of these schools, it's like the creation of a gay straight alliance or a gender and sexuality alliance. And to me, that's one of the best ways that one can support student development around that. But again, if you're in a district that does not allow certain things like that or that doesn't support it in some way, or that says that students have to bring these things up, that it can't be led by a teacher. Sometimes it means figuring out, how do I work around these laws again without getting a student certainly in trouble or a teacher fired.

I think too about the other side of that where there's educators who are working proactively to get this right, and sometimes that creates a fear of getting it wrong, where you don't want to accidentally say the wrong thing. You don't want to be reductive in ways when you're trying to be open. How do we support teachers in figuring out the conversation about preferred names and pronouns and the correlation between honoring that and improving student mental health?

Yeah, first of all, there's actually a lot of schools that don't have necessarily super stringent restrictions on what can or cannot be said. I know that some of the things that are happening right now in the media and that have happened in the past year or two, brings up some very understandable concerns about what might happen. But right now, there are still many, many, many, many school districts that allow even being able to say to students, if you identify as queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, I just want you to know that I support you. I'm inclusive. I want you to feel safe and comfortable talking with me about that, if that's something you need support around. That in and of itself, I think can be something that is said. I think about how including queer content in curriculum and using that as a moment to say, and some people in this classroom might identify this way, and that's totally okay, and I hope that folks feel comfortable talking with me about that. I think is a way to, again, let people know that this is a safe space.

Yeah. I think about an example I have with a student who asked me to use a different name in my room.

Yeah.

It was the only room that they went by their preferred name, and it was a risk to acknowledge, to normalize that, just to let everyone know that. And it wasn't an announcement. It was something I just did. I never said to everyone, Hey, X wants to be Y and this is why I'm doing it. They said to me privately, this is how I want to be referred to, and I only want to be referred to that way in this room. And I honored that. And they also said, I don't want my parents to know. So it was complicated. Why is it important? Is it important, for maybe even making it a broader question, is it important for teachers to honor students' preferences about names? And how do you make that work when what the student wants in terms of their school identity is actually not an identity that is safe for them outside of that securely attached relationship with their teacher?

Yeah, it's very much a great idea to do this because it's a validation of who someone is. If we take queerness out of the example, if one of our students comes to us and says, I have this specific thing going on in my life that's really difficult. We're not going to say, well, that's difficult, but I'm not going to validate what the difficulty might be around that, and I'm not going to support that. It's important to know and recognize that validating student identity, even outside of this typical sociocultural identity stuff, it's something that any teacher knows that that's a part of their job. It's just that queerness becomes politicized, and now we shouldn't do it for that, but we should do it for other aspects of a student identity.

What do you do when you mess up? Let's say that I use the wrong pronoun in front of a shared space. How do I fix it? Am I supposed to acknowledge it in real time? Is it a sidebar conversation?

First of all, you're a human. Give yourself some grace. You make mistakes. When I talk with some of my queer clients about people misgendering them or making assumptions about their partner being heterosexual or something like that, the issue that comes up is when someone makes a mistake, that they make it more about their error and how they want to still be seen as a good person that needs time. And what ends up happening is it's a centering of the person who made the mistake, not the person who would've been wronged. And so from a lot of clients, and even myself included in my own life, if someone makes that mistake like, the more you focus on how you did something wrong and how you're terribly sorry, the more we're talking about your feelings and experiences not-

So what should they do? What should I do?

Hey, I'm sorry, I misgendered you there.

Correct yourself.

It's misgendered,

Misgender, I said the wrong name. I might even say I'm sorry, I made an assumption there about your partner. I know I made a mistake there and then just move on. As a therapist my job with a client, if that's something like that happens because it's just between me and them, I'm likely to still ask them at some point, what was that like for you? How do you feel about that? I don't know that teachers necessarily need to go into that, but you could still pull a student aside and essentially say, I'm really sorry about that, and it is something I'm working on, and I do want you to know that even though I might slip, I really do support you and I want you to know that I'm going to work hard to make sure that that doesn't happen again as much as possible.

And the point that you had asked a moment ago that I think is important when students want you to, for example, call them by a different name or use different pronouns, but they don't want their parents to know, I think it's okay to say I'm very comfortable doing that, but have you thought about what will happen? Without trying to scare them. But in reality, if students in the class-

Practically.

... Yeah, practically, other students in the classroom or other teachers and administrators, once that starts getting out in some ways, you can't prevent parents from noticing that. And so in some ways, I might encourage teachers to have a conversation with students about the practicalities of what happens when they start to explore that identity, if not come out as trans, non-binary, gay, lesbian, what have you.

Probably many of us know this, that sometimes it is easier for students to be able to come out to the adults at school than perhaps their parents.

Yeah.

What are some best practices for educators in that situation when a student comes out? And how do you honor confidentiality, and yet, how do you still create a safe space for authentic disclosure?

Yeah, I think within reason, put it back on the student and ask them, what is it that you want from me? I've worked with some students in some of my classes who talked about a student came out to them as gay, and he said, I was really nervous because they didn't really know what to say. They didn't want me to tell anyone. They didn't want me to say anything to school administrators or their parents. And I said, that's fine. I don't think there's really any requirements that one is supposed to do that. And so as long as you're conveying to that person, again, still open, still accepting, I'm so happy to have you in my classroom. I'm still going to be supportive of you. This doesn't really change much.

Thank you for trusting me.

Thank you for trusting me is a really good one. And also asking, what does this mean? Do you want me to stay away from mentioning this or identifying you in any way around this? And for some students, that in and of itself allows them to feel safe and secure to say, you know what? I'm not ready. I just needed to tell someone, which I also want educators and just people in general to know that if someone comes to you with that, like you just said, thank you for trusting me enough to share that, that is a huge thing in your relationship with that student. And I think it should be taken with a lot of honor and respect. And sometimes that's all that needs to happen, is that that student just wants to or needs to come out to someone and maybe it stops there for them for three to six months or a year.

I worked with someone, a client of mine who came out while he was in high school, and he was just happy to come out to his parents and to talk with me about it, but he didn't want to come out in school. He just wanted someone to know so that he could get that off of his shoulders. And, of course, over time, that became easier for him, and he was able to share this with other people. So I think it's giving autonomy to students to make those decisions while also as an administrator or a teacher, if there are certain requirements or things that need to be talked about to not lie about that or misrepresent anything. One of the things I think that is becoming laws that people are trying to pass is that if a student comes out that it's a responsibility of a teacher to tell someone about that. And to me, if I'm working in a school and that's a rule that governs my educational practice, I am very likely to say something to students at some point and say-

To let them know that I'm a mandatory reporter essentially.

... around this thing. And if you ever want to talk to me about this, I'm happy to talk in broad generalities about things that are coming up for you. But once you state, I'm gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, whatever, then I'm mandated to report this. So I want you to know that you can talk with me about difficult things and the euphemism is something that we rely on to still convey to students. I want you to feel comfortable talking with me, but I want you also to know the limits of what will happen depending on what you say. And that sucks. That is not-

And that's such an interesting... If things evolve in that way, it'd be yet another new landscape for educators to have to figure out how to walk through.

And it's happening, in some states they're talking about the idea that if that happens, it has to be reported to Child Protective Services. What?

Yeah. Yeah.

That is wild to me.

I also think about the wildness of being an educator when a student says something that is incredibly homophobic or incredibly transphobic, and having to figure out how to navigate that, where you don't want to humiliate the student who says something that was super toxic. And at the same time, you're trying to figure out how to hold this boundary to maintain a sense of safety for everyone in the space. So how do teachers respond when someone says something that is transphobic, homophobic?

Yeah, you're an educator. Use it as an educational moment, and you don't have to derail your entire lesson for that day, but making a comment about this is not acceptable in this classroom and here's why. And then moving forward.

I taught in high school for 20 years that happened, and it was a teachable moment. But for me, and I don't know that I got this right, when I thought that it was widely heard, which means someone in proximity who I knew identified as heard it, then I chose to stand publicly on the side of solidarity with that student. And that meant that it was like, we don't do that. Everyone feels safe, but I don't know that I handled it the right way.

Well, first of all, I think your desire to make sure that it was clear, especially to that student, that that's not acceptable. I think it's a good thing. I would also add that keep in mind that even in spaces where students aren't out as queer, that still taking that stance, I think demonstrates again that this environment, this classroom operates a certain way. And so even if there aren't queer folks within that classroom, it still conveys that this is a particular type of space. And one thing I hear from students a lot, and I sat in on a dissertation that talked about this as well, in which students talked about knowing that a teacher heard something-

And ignored it

... and ignored it. And whether it was someone who said something really offensive, really loudly, or if it's a side comment, students, regardless of age, pick up on that. And if it's ever a question in their mind, whether or not a teacher heard it or not, in terms of protecting themselves, I think they're much more likely to assume that the teacher heard it and is ignoring it, which in this situation, I think is more harmful than good because it conveys that people can say these things even in passing, and this person will not say something.

It is not worth mentioning, which again, seeks to invalidate their own humanity. It can be in some ways just dehumanizing to be invisible.

And another thing I should have mentioned this at the start, is that I think it's also about expectations that are set in the very beginning of the year. I think that most educators at the very beginning of the year talk to their students about what will happen in this classroom and what will not happen in this classroom. And it, of course, doesn't have to focus just on queer people, but it's important to set expectations about what is and is not acceptable and to follow through with it. Again, related to the point about saying problematic things that if a teacher tells their students hate speech or offensive language will not be used, but then they don't follow up on it again, that doesn't really engender a safe, secure environment for, again, not just queer people, but people of all sorts of marginalized status.

Are there a couple that you'd like to highlight organizations and resources that can help support educators supporting LGBT+ students in the future?

Yeah, definitely. The top of the list is GLSEN, the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, but essentially an organization that is focused on working with queer individuals in educational spaces. There's resources for parents, for students, for educators, there's trainings. There's even some of the most basic stuff. So there's stuff there for folks from a lot of different backgrounds who are trying to support queer people within educational spaces.

Well, thank you so much for setting aside some time to join us on the Educator's Playbook podcast. So happy to be in conversation with you, Kyle.

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the platform to be able to talk about this.

Thanks again to Kyle for taking the time to speak with me. He's written several articles on this topic for the Educator's Playbook newsletter, which you can read on our website, educatorsplaybook.com. You'll also find tips from Maria there as well.

Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the Educator's Playbook podcast wherever you listen, and please leave a review and five star rating to help your colleagues discover us too. Educator's Playbook is produced in Philadelphia by the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education in partnership with RADIOKISMET. This podcast is produced by Amy Carson. Our mix engineer is Justin Berger. Christopher Plant is RADIOKISMET's Head of Operations, and Ben Geise is our project manager. Matthew Vlahos is our executive producer, and I'm your host, Kimberly McGlonn. Thanks so much for listening. This has been Educator's Playbook.