by Robert Schmad
A federally-funded training program set to take place in July will teach middle school teachers about LGBTQ+ history and provide them with strategies to further integrate “queer” content into their classrooms.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is funding a two-week summer program titled “LGBTQ+ histories in the U.S.” that will instruct 30 middle and high school teachers on “expanding historical narratives” and “identifying pedagogical strategies” in their classrooms to better incorporate LGBTQ+ content. The July session is the second iteration of the NEH-funded program, the first having occurred in 2022, with the two activities collectively costing taxpayers nearly $400,000, according to federal grant listings.
The City University of New York’s Center for Media and Learning is administering the July training. Educators participating in the program will receive $1,100 per week as a stipend, according to the program’s website.
The NEH-funded LGBTQ+ classroom integration program is structured around a handful of “guiding questions,” according to the program’s website. Teachers attending the NEH’s program are asked to consider how they can “teach LGBTQ+ experiences as integral to the American experience,” cover how LGBTQ+ identity intersects with race and understand LGBTQ+ identity.
On the first day of the program, participating teachers are scheduled to learn about the “historical context for contemporary efforts to legislate and restrict LGBTQ+ topics within United States’ schools.” The following day, teachers will discuss how “Indigenous expressions of sexual and gender identity [were] impacted by colonialism.”
A historian will present a “queer history of immigration policy” to the teachers at a later session, followed by a field trip to the “Lesbian Herstory Archives” in Brooklyn.
Teachers will begin work on an “LGBTQ+ teaching module” on the last day of the program to be completed by the “end of the summer.”
The program’s website hosts a series of videos where teachers who participated in the 2022 iteration of the program reflected on their motivations for attending, the impact of the program on professional development and “the significance of learning LGBTQ+ history in the current political moment,” among other things.
“This pushback, this moment that we’re in, is not an anomaly,” a history teacher said in one such video documenting how the program helped her in “understanding the rise of conservative resistance to inclusive education.”
“We as a queer community have won, have had these victories again and again and again and you’re not going to stop us,” she continued.
Another teacher said that she “love[s] that students feel they can just start talking about queer stuff with me.”
“That’s the life-saving stuff,” she continued. She complained about her school having a religious student body where children have a “very limited understanding of trans identity.”
One teacher spoke to the purported importance of telling LGBTQ+ stories, saying that they have a “vendetta” against standardized testing as tests don’t “measure you as the person that you’re going to be in the world.”
“I know, for myself, while this seminar was about LGBT narratives in history, the context of it was so much more because there’s so much at stake when we are with our children,” she continued.
The same teacher referred to her students as her “babies” in another video reflection.
The average public middle school classroom had 22 students during the 2020-2021 school year, while the average public high school class had 21 students during that same period, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. If the 60 teachers set to participate in the NEH-funded LGBTQ+ training each have four average-sized classes per day, they would collectively be teaching 5,760 students per year.
NEH did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Robert Schmad is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
