Education Week - September 6, 2017 - 15

'UNERASING' CONTENT
Morgenstern were colleagues at
Lowell High School, wrestling with
how to respond to students' demand
via petition for more LGBT topics
in their classes. Morgenstern hesitated at first: "I just knew teachers
weren't ready to do it. They didn't
have the materials or the background knowledge," she said.
Within a year, the two teachers
had set up the organization to supply those resources. Both now work
for it full time.
The group has been supported
mostly through grants, and it partners with historical archives and
a well-respected podcast to locate
the primary-source documents and
oral histories that form the basis of
lesson plans and trainings like this
one.
The bulk of the training is devoted to working with historical
sources. After all, the HUE leaders
reason, if you want to understand
the importance of this history, then
you must be engaged in practicing
historical inquiry. "Everything we
do is grounded in primary and secondary sources, so teachers can feel
confident that this is real history,"
Morgenstern said. "It's not something we're making up."
Engaging students in inquiry is
key, they say, but teachers play an
important role in helping students
separate fact from fiction, navigate a
crowded media landscape, and demonstrate the validity of their historical arguments. As to content, HUE
has developed resources addressing
a range of topics, including the firing of LGBT employees during the

Cold War; the Harlem Renaissance,
which birthed poets such as Countee Cullen and gave rise to performance and art forms that broke
gender norms; and the myths surrounding the 1969 riot at New York
City's Stonewall Inn.
It's natural to wonder how such
curricula can be appropriate at the
grade school level, where LGBT issues tend to be more controversial.
But as the HUE leaders point out,
the curriculum is not about sex,
but rather how gender relations
and identity have been shaped over
time by historical circumstance. In
the 19th century, for example, some
women assumed male garb to fight
in the U.S. Civil War; others joined
together in "Boston marriages" that
supplied financial and emotional
support rather than marry; and
here in Lowell, girls who came to
work in the city's own textile mills
lived together in close-knit dormitories.

The nonprofit History UnErased is drafting examples of how teachers
can infuse LGBT issues into their lessons. Each includes background
information, suggested primary and secondary sources, and crossdisciplinary connections.
If you teach about how to delineate and evaluate an argument, infuse
Huey Newton's speech from Aug. 15, 1970, "A Letter to the Revolutionary
Brothers and Sisters About the Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation
Movements." The topic intersects with U.S. history, including the Black
Panthers and the civil rights movement.
n

If you teach President Richard M. Nixon and the Watergate
scandal, infuse U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan's address to the House
Judiciary Committee on the articles of impeachment during the Nixon
impeachment hearings. Background information includes the fact that
Jordan's domestic partner of 20 years, Nancy Earl, was an occasional
speechwriter for Jordan. The topic intersects with standards for analyzing
how rhetoric contributes to an author's point of view or purpose in a text.
n

If you teach the Japanese internment camps, infuse actor George
Takei's TED Talk and transcript, "Why I Love a Country That Once Betrayed
Me." Included in the background information is a reference to George
Takei's husband, Brad Takei. The topic intersects with literature-for
example, David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars.
n

SOURCE: History UnErased

Understanding Context
The HUE educators caution that
modern conceptions of homosexuality and gender identity didn't
develop until the 20th century, and
so teachers need to be careful when
they discuss such examples with
students. "We are not assigning
today's language to the past. That
would be ahistorical and irresponsible," Morgenstern said.
Historians agree that that's a
good practice, to help dispel teachers' concerns about being accused
of promoting ideology or an "activ-

ist agenda," said Beth Slutsky, a
University of California, Davis, associate professor of history, who has
helped craft LGBT-inclusive lesson
plans for California teachers.
"We have been telling them, be really upfront with students. It's OK
to say that people have described
race and they've described gender
in different terms over time, and the
way we talk about it now is different
than in the past, but that doesn't
mean that families and relationships didn't happen," she said.

Although they're history teachers
first, Fowler and Morgenstern are
also expanding HUE's teaching resources to other subjects and grade
levels.
Often, that means thinking
through how to analyze those topics
through an LGBT lens. It needn't be
expansive, they point out-just one
more critical perspective in a larger
discussion.
Take literature, for example. The
protagonist of The Catcher in the
Rye, a coming-of-age novel often

taught in high school, seems discomforted by a friend's discussion
of gay people and at one point confides: "I kept waiting to turn into
a flit or something." As students
wrestle with Holden Caulfield's
struggle to understand himself,
why not ask how their perspective
changes if they assume, for a moment, that Holden is gay?
So far, there's a groundswell of
interest in their work even beyond
K-12; attendees at this summer's
session included a community college activities coordinator and a
staffer at a local youth center. But
the leaders recognize that their
training will take time to bear fruit.
"It's a long game," Fowler said.
"We will probably not live to see this
normalized in curriculum in our lifetime."
And supporters say persistence
matters for the underlying lessons
in inclusive curricula to take root.
Smith, the New York City curriculum developer, recalled teaching
Shyan Selvadurai's novel, Funny
Boy, a book about a Sri Lankan
youth coming to terms with being
gay on the eve of that country's
civil war. A year after, he watched
as the same teenagers who lovingly
dog-eared their copies relentlessly
teased a gay teacher at the school.
"These kids really cared about
these issues intellectually, but when
they had a queer teacher in front of
them, that didn't translate," he said.
"It's not just intellectual history
about queer people, but about how
that creates empathy."

EDUCATION WEEK | September 6, 2017 | www.edweek.org | 15

http://www.edweek.org/go/webinars http://www.edweek.org/go/webinars/TechIntegration http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - September 6, 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - September 6, 2017