Teacher training on accompanying LGBTIQA+ students: a pending task
The trans law includes an entire section on measures in the field of education that requires education administrations and universities to train teachers in sexual and gender diversity, but it does not appear that this specialisation exists to date.
According to the latest survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (in 2023), in Spain some 46% of all LGBTIQA+ people aged 15-17 answered ‘Yes, by my peers’ to the question ‘During your schooling, have you ever been ridiculed, teased, insulted or threatened for being LGBTIQ’, and some 7% answered ‘Yes, by teachers or other employees of the educational institution’. Of non-binary people in the same age group, 67% responded ‘Yes, by my peers’ and 22% ‘Yes, by teachers’. Interestingly, in the 18-24 age group, these figures are lower, indicating that the situation has worsened. And, 91% of intersex people of all ages surveyed responded ‘Yes, by peers’ (11% by teachers).
Some 14% of all LGBTIQA+ people aged 15-17 had to change high school because they were LGBTIQA+, rising to 24% for non-binary people, 48% for trans men in the same age group, and 42% for intersex people of all ages. Again, these figures are lower for the 18-24 age group, indicating a worsening situation.
These figures are alarming. And, although Law 4/2023, of 28 February, for the real and effective equality of trans people and for the guarantee of the rights of LGTBI people, commonly known as the Trans and LGTBI Law, which came into force in March 2023, includes an entire section on measures in the field of education, which requires educational administrations and universities to train teachers in sexual and gender diversity, I doubt that much has changed. According to the law, one of the duties of the educational administrations is to promote ‘the adoption of coeducation and diversity plans that include, among others, actions related to teacher training in respect for sexual, gender and family diversity of LGTBI people’. The reality is different.
According to the same FRA survey, 63% of LGTBIQA+ people never talk openly about being LGTBIQA+ at school, about 20% rarely. These numbers of concealment are even higher in the case of gay men: 75% and 15% respectively. This is a consequence of the violent pressure to fit into patterns of cisheterosexual masculinity.
Trans and non-binary students at school suffer more discrimination than LGBTIQA+ students in general, and are much less visible, as more than half hide their identity. To start thinking about trans or non-binary students when there is a visible trans student, as is the case in most schools, is too late. The starting point should be: there are trans and non-binary students in every school and high school, in most classrooms, although mostly not visible. Education should be trans-inclusive by all means, to provide a trans-affirming and trans-inclusive environment, which allows trans students to feel safe and welcome.
There is no data on asexual and/or arromantic people. In fact, the ‘A’ as asexual and arromantic is also not included in the law, leaving asexuality out of sex education.
Why teacher training?
“Schools should be safe, inclusive and supportive of all learners. Yet, LGBTI learners endure hostile conditions at school, experiencing or risking physical violence, bullying and discrimination. Such experiences negatively affect students’ health and well-being but also lead to worse education outcomes, showing in higher absenteeism and lower educational attainment and aspirations, as observed with all students who suffer violence,” so the UNESCO and IGLYO report Don't look away: no place for exclusion of LGBTI students.
The actions of school staff when they witness LGTBphobic comments, bullying or other related violence have a direct effect on school climate. The survey Don't Look Away: no place for exclusion of LGBTI Students, referring to the case of the EU, found that ‘the majority of students (58%) never reported these incidents to school staff and less than 15% of respondents consistently reported them to a member of school staff’. When asked why they did not report these incidents, ‘two-thirds indicated that school staff had not intervened in previous situations (35%), or that they feared they would do nothing (30%).’
According to the FRA survey, almost two thirds of LGTBIQA+ people of all ages received support never (31%) or rarely (30%) in situations of negative comments or harassment, although here we can see an improvement in recent years. Two thirds of LGTBIQA+ 15-17 year olds received support often (35%) or always (34%), figures that drop considerably in older age groups.
There is an added problem for LGTBIQA+ people: if they do not feel safe to come out to staff in the institution, they can hardly report harassment or negative comments.
Something is failing in the education system. Something, which contributes to the minority stress that LGTBIQA+ people face in our cisalosexualheteropatriarchal society and thus contributes to greater mental health problems in LGTBIQA+ students and lower academic achievement.
And, although LGBTIQA+ groups do a great job in visiting schools to talk about sexual and gender diversity, this is at most once a year, and does not reach all schools. Thus, in their daily lives, LGTBIQA+ students are left alone, without allies among teachers and other educational staff, who are present every day. At best, teachers are indifferent to the specific needs of LGBTIQA+ students and how they themselves perpetuate cisheteronormative and allosexist norms, at worst, they could be openly LGBTIQA-phobic.
LGTBIQA+ students: too many windows, not enough mirrors
LGTBIQA+ students have an equal right to enjoy education and to experience the school as a safe and learning space. Emily Style, in a 1988 article, speaks of the need for the curriculum as a window and mirror, ‘in order to reflect and reveal as accurately as possible both a multicultural world and the learner's own self. If each individual learner is understood to occupy an abode of self, education must enable him or her to look through window frames to see the realities of others and through mirrors to see his or her own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of frames is basic to a balanced education committed to the affirmation of the essential dialectic between the self and the world’.
How many mirrors are there in education curricula for LGBTIQA+ people? For lesbian, gay, bisexual people? For trans men and women, for non-binary, gender-fluid, or ancestral non-binary identities? For queer people, for intersex people, for asexual and/or arromantic people? The more you approach minority identities within the LGBTIQA+ collective, the more the answer moves from ‘few’ to ‘none’. Emily Style says: ‘All students deserve a curriculum that reflects their own experience, thus validating it in the public world of school. But the curriculum must also insist on fresh air from windows into the experience of others, who also need and deserve public validation of the school curriculum’.
LGTBIQA+ students, and especially trans, non-binary, intersex, asexual or arromantic students, are forced to look out of the window almost all the time at the cisalosexualheteropatriarchal reality in the curriculum, in the classroom. They rarely - perhaps never - have the opportunity to look in the mirror, to see their reality validated. This is not only harmful to LGTBIQA+ students, it is also harmful to cisgender and heterosexual students, as it obscures other realities from them, it does not provide them with the opportunity to learn from and about other realities. Styles concludes: ‘Such inaccuracy and imbalance undermine the education of all our children. Some students (...) remain subordinate and silent, though their vision is actually broader, while others strut across the stage of life insensitive to other points of view. We all lose when education is framed in this way’.
Building an education that includes windows and mirrors for LGTBIQA+ students requires training. Teacher training on how to include LGTBIQA+ content in the curriculum, how to make the classroom a safe place for LGTBIQA+ students, how to accompany LGTBIQA+ students. Where is this training?
Four levels of LGTBIQA+ inclusion in the classroom
How can teachers include LGTBIQA+ content in the classroom? How can they include content that serves as a mirror for LGTBIQA+ students and a window for cisgender and heterosexual students? In a chapter called The Mainstream-Centric Curriculum, James A. Banks offers a four-level system of inclusion in the case of multicultural content - how to include racialised minorities in the classroom. This concept is also offered for the inclusion of LGTBIQA+ content, as Laura Moorhead shows in an article in the online magazine Kappan.
The four levels according to Banks are:
- Level 1: Contributions. At this level, practitioners may look for heroes, holidays and discrete cultural elements to include in the curriculum. This approach can be superficial and focus on LGBTIQA+ people and their contributions from a mainstream perspective. However, it provides a starting point and an icebreaker for classroom discussions.
- Level 2: Additions. Adds content, concepts, themes and perspectives to the curriculum without changing its structure. The second level incorporates LGTBIQA+ content, concepts, themes and perspectives without changing the structure and overall orientation of the curriculum. The drawbacks of this approach are, again, a lack of depth of content; a view of LGBTIQA+ people and their contributions from the dominant perspective; and a tendency to make sexuality and gender seem like an afterthought, rather than a fundamental part of one's being.
- Level 3: Transformation. The third level takes educators into the realm of substantive curriculum change as they reframe content to encourage multiple perspectives on concepts, issues, events and themes. Specifically, this may include studying the social construction of LGBTIQA+ people and cultures across time and space; theoretical debates about sexual orientation, identity formation and intersecting oppressions (e.g. LGBTIQA+ people of colour); gender roles and gender identity; homophobia; and HIV/AIDS.
- Level 4: Social action. Encourages students to make decisions about important social issues and to take action to help address them. This can be done through projects inside or outside the school, where non-LGTBIQA+ students practice being good allies. Service-learning methods are also offered, i.e. developing projects within the community, for example to combat LGTBIQA+phobia.
Practitioners including LGBTQ+ content in curricula for the first time can start at the initial levels of Banks and gradually move to the latter, or they can reserve the lower levels for the early grades and opt for the higher levels for more advanced grades. Another option is to identify content areas (e.g. literature, history or social studies) to pilot the higher approaches, allowing for gradual structural changes in the curriculum.
Teachers as allies of LGBTIQA+ students?
In order to be able to accompany trans and non-binary students, it seems key that teachers and other staff in educational institutions become aware of their own cisgender privilege. Kyle Sawyer says in an article entitled Privilege and the Three Phases of Active-Allyship: ‘Being an active ally requires us to understand that we can be wrong. It asks us to question many of the things we ‘know’ and have been taught as true. It asks us to be aware of the micro-aggressions and experiences we have never considered. It requires us to make space in our heads and hearts for new ways of listening, learning and being.’
Teachers and other school staff have the opportunity to become allies of LGTBIQA+ students, and thus contribute to making the school a (more) safe space that allows LGTBIQA+ students to flourish. However, this is not done simply out of goodwill. Leigh Potvin says in It's not all rainbows and unicorns: Straight teacher allies reflect on privilege: ‘Heterosexual privilege is so pervasive that it can be difficult for heterosexual people to realise and acknowledge it. Ingraham and Saunders call it the heterosexual imaginary. The assumption that the experiences of heterosexual people are the only set of human experiences, or the only way to experience the world, reinforces and maintains the dominance of heterosexual people.’ Without realising and questioning their own cisgender and heterosexual privilege, cis and heterosexual teachers run the risk of, for example, misinterpreting safety for LGBTIQA+ learners, interpreting the situation through their privileged cis-heterosexual lens.
Preventing and responding to LGTBIQA+-phobic bullying
According to the FRA survey, of the 7% of respondents aged 15-17 who have experienced an incident of physical or sexual violence because they are LGTBIQA+ in the 12 months prior to the survey, 27% have experienced it at school. Of the 72% of the same age group who experienced bullying in the 12 months prior to the survey, 37% experienced it at school. Add to these figures of violence and bullying LGTBIQA+phobic comments, and the picture of an unsafe educational environment emerges.
Although anti-bullying protocols exist in most autonomous communities, it is obvious that these protocols are not sufficient, and rarely differentiate between LGTBIQA-phobic bullying and other forms of bullying (racist, ableist, etc.). Furthermore, an approach that individualises the problem of bullying as an issue between the perpetrator and the victim completely ignores that bullying arises in a context of a social climate that enables bullying. When bullying occurs, it is not limited to two people. There is a deeper problem, including within the educational community beyond the school itself.
Both punitivist approaches, which focus on punishing the perpetrator of bullying, and mediation, which seeks to ‘resolve’ a conflict, leave out the context. A bullying prevention strategy should focus on combating a patriarchal and LGTBIQA+phobic culture in the school and the wider educational community (including students' families) through sexual and gender diversity education. Where bullying has occurred, transformative justice approaches, which involve not only the perpetrator and the victim but the wider educational community, again, beyond the school, are more appropriate to repair the harm caused and change the culture that has facilitated the bullying. BLAM UK says in a text on transformative justice in schools, ‘Although transformative justice builds on the restorative justice framework, it goes further by encouraging those who use it to think beyond the person who has caused the harm, and urges them to focus on the socio-political factors that have influenced a person's behaviour.’ Transformative justice ‘actively cultivates the things we know prevent violence, such as healing, accountability, resilience and safety for all involved,’ according to a text by Mia Mingus.
Conclusions
“Schools need to be able to support their pupils.
I get called a f****** faggot when I’m with my
girlfriend in public, my parents don’t accept me at
home, so school needs to be a safe place.".
Ash, 17 years (Trans Inclusion Toolkit Version 2, 2019)
The reality in Spain is far from what Ash in the UK demanded in the 2019 Trans Inclusion Toolkit. Spanish schools, for the most part, are not safe spaces for LGTBIQA+ students, even less so for marginalised groups within LGTBIQA+ communities: trans and non-binary people, intersex people.
But, although the attitude of teachers can be positive, there is a need for training. Cristina A. Huertas-Abril and Francisco Javier Palacios-Hidalgo conclude in a research on teacher training: “Helping trainee teachers to explicitly reflect on their attitudes, perceptions and experiences can enhance their competences and skills to help create more inclusive and safer schools for LGBTIQ+ students and their families. Teacher training is therefore essential, as research shows that even when trainee teachers have positive views towards the LGBTIQ+ community, their lack of awareness or experience of these issues can hinder their teaching practice.”
From my own experience with some teacher trainings I find it important that these trainings are delivered by LGTBIQA+ people, and, for the trans and non-binary part, by trans and/or non-binary trainers. This comes with its own challenges for trainers, as it exposes them to their own vulnerabilities and traumas, but it can be very beneficial for teacher training.
Teacher training is key to combating LGTBIQA+-phobia in education, but not enough. Structural changes are needed. The entire education system in Spain is structurally cisalosexualheteropatriarchal, favouring education in heteronormative and amatonormative ways of life. Beyond teacher training, structural oppressions in the education system must be fought in order to build a truly diverse and inclusive education system.
Published (in Spanish) in El Salto, 26 January 2025, https://www.elsaltodiario.com/opinion/formacion-profesorado-acompanar-alumnado-lgbtiqa+