Article

How to Craft an Open Classroom

A teacher examines the intentionality that creates a safe and inclusive environment for LGBT students.

There are three critical choices that I have made as an educator, which have helped me to create a safe and inclusive space for my students. They involve choices around the physical space, the presence of student voice and a sense of courage.

My goal is to create a space where all students learn to value their individuality and their authentic selves, while also learning to value the individuality and perspectives that others bring to the classroom. If every student feels valued for who they are, a sense of trust lives in the classroom, and that trust allows all students to feel comfortable enough to take intellectual risks. For LGBT students, the risks they face throughout the school day may not be intellectual but acutely emotional or physical. According to the 2013 GLSEN National School Climate Survey, a majority of LGBT students feel that school is either unsafe or unwelcoming. For them, a safe environment may be a critical necessity.

The first intentional choice: the space. When I had my very first classroom, I had little idea what I wanted to do with the physical space. Only one thing was certain in my mind: I wanted an “upside-down” world map. Why? It’s a visual aid to help teach my students the nature of a perspective. It became a talking point among my middle school students: Whenever there was a dull moment in class, some student would point to the wall and ask, “Why is it upside-down?” And I’d respond, “It’s not.” That exchange is a beginning point to help them realize that their way of looking at the world seems ordinary, from their specific point of view.

For LGBT or questioning students, this environment is a necessity. Over the years, I have included posters of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, two poets whose homosexuality is an integral part of their poetry (just as my heterosexuality is an integral aspect of my own writing). My quotation wall has featured writers like Toni Morrison, Margaret Meade and Robert F. Kennedy. One of the more recent additions features the words of Paulo Freire, who cautions against the danger of inaction when faced with injustice.

The second intentional choice: to value and encourage student voice. Early in the school year, I like to employ different forms of class discussions. With a “chalk-talk” or “discussion board”— depending upon your level of technological comfort—students are given markers and a large wall space covered with butcher-block paper, and they must silently engage in a discussion. Depending upon the literature read, this might involve a prompt like any of the following:

  • What aspects of identity are immutable and which change?
  • What does it mean to be an outsider?
  • What is the relationship of the individual to the community?

Like individual response or journaling, this approach allows all students to engage, but here, every student has a chance to be validated by their peers for their insight and perspective.

The third intentional choice: to practice courage and risk-taking myself. Back in 1999, in suburban Massachusetts, it was a risk for me to stop students from saying, “That’s so gay.” The saying was so common that it seemed I would be alone in my attempt. Every year since then, with every new class, I still get a little nervous the first time I choose to stand up for gay students.

Similarly, it is an act of courage, in some fashion, to address Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality when teaching The Importance of Being Earnest, or Holden Caulfield’s homophobia in The Catcher in the Rye, or the complex female relationships in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees. When I act courageously in the classroom, I express my sense of trust in my students. I am trusting their maturity, their willingness to look from different perspectives and their inherent desire to be members of a community. Trust is actually the most important quality of a safe space for an LGBT student. I’ve just described how I strive every day to create it.

Editor’s note: For more ideas on how to value and encourage student voices, check out the Community Inquiry strategies in Perspectives for a Diverse America. Perspectives also offers K-12 readings and videos by and about LGBT individuals. Filter for the LGBT lens in the Central Text Anthology.

Elliott teaches high school English and creative writing at an independent, college preparatory school. 

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