Talking Points #3 (super late, but better than never)

Dennis Carlson
“Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community”

1) “At the level of state educational policy, it is noteworthy that no state currently recognizes gays and lesbians as legitimate minority or cultural groups to be considered in textbook adoption or to be included in multicultural education; and a number of states explicitly prohibit teaching about homosexuality.” Pg. 236

I thought this was interesting because I didn’t realize that homosexuality was being banned from the curriculum on the state level. I find it interesting that ethnic literature and history is beginning to be integrated into the curriculum for students, but nothing about gays and lesbians. I wonder if the continued avoidance of the topic is because some people believe you can choose to be gay or lesbian, but cannot choose what race you are. Therefore if it is shunned in school, it would deter young people from feeling that the gay/lesbian lifestyle is okay.

2) “Aside from being an absence in the curriculum, gayness has been made visible in some various limited and marginalized contexts. To the extent that gayness is recognized in the curriculum, it is likely to be in the health curriculum, where it is associated with disease.” Pg. 237
When a child is taught about homosexuality, they learn about it in a negative context. Homosexuals are associated with AIDS because they were one of the first groups of people it was discovered in within the country. Again the school system seems to be doing everything it can possibly do because they want to discourage the students from accepting the gay and lesbian lifestyle.

3) “Part of the problem to begin with was that the curriculum was developed by school district staff in the central office with relatively little input from the communities that were to ’implement’ the imposed plan for multicultural education.” Pg. 250

This seems similar to the problem with multilingual education in that the people who have to use the educational curriculum have little input on what it would look like. It causes tension between the school and the home cultures. Also it could make children feel like they are not good enough if their culture is not represented in the curriculum.

There was one part of the article that I could really connect to. It was when the “witch-hunting” of gay teachers was being discussed. This actually happened in my high school. I went to a pretty strict Catholic high school and we had a gay English teacher in our freshman year. The administration did not know that the teacher was gay for about three years. All the kids had their suspicions, be we all respected and liked him enough not to voice those suspicions to parents or the principal. One kid got a D as a midterm grade and he was pretty upset about it. He didn’t think that he deserved it so he decided that he was going to get back at the English teacher. He told his mother, conservative Portuguese-speaking Catholic, that the English teacher was gay and was making comments to all the boys in the class. Completely false information, but the mother took it to the principal and the principal had the teacher removed. He was allowed to finish the year, but the vice-principal oversaw all his classes and he was not allowed to talk to any of the students outside of class. He was humiliated and we lost a really good teacher just because he was gay. It was like the administration thought that gayness was contagious or something. The school is independent and doesn’t answer to the Diocese or the school district so there was no way that we could have the decision overturned.