Short description:

This book offers insights, strategies, and lesson plans for teaching LGBTQ+ history. With essays from educators, historians, activists, policy makers, and youth advocates, it speaks to the power and significance of LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum and its necessity at a time when the LGBTQ+ community is more visible and increasingly targeted.

Long description:

Teaching LGBTQ+ History: Practical Strategies and Voices of Experience offers insights, concrete strategies, and lesson plans for teaching LGBTQ+ history in high schools. With essays from educators, historians, and activists, it speaks to the power and significance of LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum and their greater necessity at a time when the LGBTQ+ community is both more visible and increasingly targeted.

Across the US, challenges exist that prevent teaching LGBTQ+ history, including curriculum censorship laws prohibiting discussion of the LGBTQ+ community in schools. However, there are also grassroots movements in the US that are generating quality LGBTQ+ history curriculum and implementing them in secondary schools. This book shows how integrating LGBTQ+ content offers myriad benefits for all students, including making history more relevant and representative, and reversing years of silence and erasure in the sources, topics, and narratives that students encounter throughout their education.

Combining insights from changemakers with practical strategies and lesson plans for teaching LGBTQ+ history, this book will equip educators with the rationale and resources they need to effectively integrate this history into the curriculum. It will also be highly valuable for pre-service teachers, particularly within Social Studies Education and Social Justice Education.

This book is a marvel. And we need it now more than ever. Teaching LGBTQ+ History in High Schools is a book for and by teachers. It features contributions from a wide range of thinkers and practitioners invested in the art and craft of teaching accurate history that also diversifies the voices that we have been told are worth studying. They authors offer personal stories of empowerment and strategy in the classroom, while also laying out a roadmap to help ensure LGBTQ+ history remains a key part of our curricula.

Julio Capo, Jr., Florida International University, Author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940

Written by teachers, for teachers, Teaching LGBTQ+ History in High Schools shares theories of pedagogy, classroom-tested curricular activities, and examples proving the continued relevance of the LGBTQ+ past. Most powerfully, it offers the voices of educators speaking from the perspective of their classrooms and with the wisdom of experience.  Brimming with creativity and compassion, the volume combines practical guidance for those who want to introduce or more fully incorporate LGBTQ+ topics in history and social studies classes with inspiring accounts of the positive impact that teachers can make in the lives of their students. And vice versa! At a time when public education in the U.S. seems mired in divisive politics, Teaching LGBTQ+ History brings a reminder of the transformative possibility of schools.

Anne Valk, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York & Director of the American Social History Project

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Imperative to Teach LGBTQ+ in Challenging Times  Part I: Why We Need to Teach LGBTQ+ History: Voices of Experience  1. Voices from the Academy: Professors as Agents of Change  2. Voices from the Classroom: Teachers? Perspectives on the Importance of LGBTQ+   3. Voices in Higher Education: Teacher Educators? Perspectives on LGBTQ+ Inclusive  4. Voices of Activism: LGBTQ+ History?s Power to Create Societal Change  Part II: How We Can Teach LGBTQ+ History: Practical Strategies  5. Voices from the Field: Incorporating LGBTQ+ History in Middle and High School  6. Conclusion