Perspectives on gender and sexual diversity (GSD)-inclusive education: comparisons between gay/lesbian/bisexual and straight educators

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a national study on the beliefs and practices of K-12 educators regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) issues in schools. Over 3400 Canadian educators participated in the study, which took the form of a bilingual (English/French) online survey. Respondents answered questions about their values regarding human rights and LGBTQ-inclusive education, their practices in the classroom, experiences with homophobic and transphobic harassment, and perceptions of support for LGBTQ-inclusive practices. Results indicate that there is a high level of in-principle support for LGBTQ-inclusive education (84.9%); however, actual practice is much lower (61.8%) and there are significant differences in the perspectives and experiences of gay, lesbian, and bisexual identified educators compared with their straight colleagues in terms of curriculum integration and bullying interventions. Findings offer important insights for teacher preparation, curriculum development, and law and policy implementation and reform.

Keywords::

• gender and sexual diversity
• inclusive education
• bullying
• homophobia
• teacher education

Notes

^1. Although we use the term ‘GSD-inclusive education’ throughout this paper, in the survey we used the term LGBTQ-inclusive in order to ensure that respondents understood the specific topics and issues that we wanted to know about.

^2. We only discuss the responses for LGBQ educators because of the low number of trans^* or gender-free identified educators who completed the survey (n ≤  25).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant number 410-2011-0845.