Dive Brief:
- At a community meeting on Tuesday, Houston's Independent School District superintendent, Richard Carranza, said that he would support a move to add LGBTQ studies, as well as ethnic studies into U.S. history curriculum, as they have become an integral parts of America's past, reports Education Week.
- Currently, California is the only state that has mandated LGBTQ history to be incorporated into social studies curriculum after a law was passed in 2011; and few other states have adopted into the curriculum voluntarily.
- Carranza's sentiments come at the same time Texas legislators are preparing to debate at a special session in July over restroom use by transgender students and teachers in public schools, reports Chron.
Dive Insight:
As students must enter a workforce prepared to collaborate with people from myriad gender and racial backgrounds, exposure in the classroom to diversity at all levels is becoming increasingly important. Throughout both K-12 and higher education, administrators are realizing that addressing diversity within and outside the classroom is becoming less of an option and more of a necessity. However, some are still slow to acknowledge diversity isn't just related to race; students that are coming into colleges and universities are becoming more vocal about how they identify along the lines of gender, as well. And, administrators that don't account for inclusion of these groups on campus can run the risk of creating an atmosphere that's ripe for campus unrest and that also looks less appealing to a new generation of students. And, at the K12 level, exclusionary practices around diversity do little to prepare students for the real world, where people from all types of backgrounds will be collaborating with each other.
Carranza's suggestion of integrating ethnic and LGBTQ studies into the curriculum itself is one way administrators at all education levels can start to address how students can coexist with one another, in a strategy that is less likely to cause offense to any one particular group of people. For instance, Evergreen State College's recent protest concerned the Day of Absence — an event intended to show the importance of inclusion, which ended up resulted in escalated race-related protests and violent threats over social media. Administrators can turn toward Carranza's sentiments for another idea of a way to proactively address campus grievances, as classes help students understand how people of different backgrounds fit into the American narrative.