Representation Matters: Teaching the Rainbow

We’ve all heard the phrase “representation matters” with regard to media critiques, highlighting the need for stories featuring people from diverse backgrounds in books, television, and film. For marginalized individuals, a media diet with diverse representation can hold up a much-needed mirror, providing a sense of belonging, creating community connections, and sparking imaginations for a thriving future. For others, inclusive media can erode stereotypes, build empathy, and provide a lens through which to better understand the world around them. Yet, for many youth in the United States, access to LGBTQ+ media can be hard to come by.

A National Center for Education Statistics survey revealed that nearly 65 percent of American students reported that they did not have access to information about LGBTQ+-related topics in their school library, through the internet on school computers, or in their textbooks or other assigned readings. 

Rackham doctoral candidate Kyle P. Smith not only advocates for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ literature in the classroom, but his research explores best practices in teaching LGBTQ+ content to students from a wide range of backgrounds.

“Literature allows you to spend time with stories about people who are different from you or who you may see yourself in, which can have a transformative power. Whenever we limit stories in our classrooms, that communicates to students what parts of themselves can and cannot be present in the classroom,” Smith says.

Prior to graduate school, Smith taught high school English in Kentucky, a job that he enjoyed with communities that he felt connected to. 

However, as a gay-identifying man, bringing LGBTQ+ books into the curriculum was a risk, especially because he started his career prior to the Bostock v. Clayton County Supreme Court case in 2020—the ruling that made employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity illegal in the United States.

“When I was teaching high school, there was this tension between what I felt was possible when teaching LGBTQ texts and fears surrounding my own personal story,” Smith says.

Often, when teaching nonfiction stories with queer characters or topics, Smith would find himself burying his own identity out of self preservation; he did not feel he could be open about his identity at school.

“I feel like I didn’t do a good job at representing queerness in the classroom in a way that I would’ve wanted to. In my research now, I’m trying to do better than what I was doing in the past when teaching in order to be a better educator moving forward.”

One aspect of Smith’s research involved critically analyzing discourse of classroom discussions of author Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, a text with a Muslim LGBTQ+ theme, in an undergraduate classroom of students who agreed to participate in the research.

The students came from a variety of backgrounds, and most of them were white, cisgender, and straight-identifying. The conversation revealed student explorations not only of queer identity, but of what it might mean to be Muslim. Students grappled with their ideas of the main character’s individual expression of religion and queerness versus definitions of queerness and Islam more broadly.

“I think that it’s really important to acknowledge that treating queerness as ‘other’ can happen unintentionally,” Smith says, encouraging educators to understand their own identity-based positionality towards the content to help mitigate this impact—and help their students do the same.

Reflecting on the work, Smith also compares some forms of curricular inclusion to items on a lunch tray, where each topic—African American literature, Latine literature, LGBTQ+ literature, and so on—is placed separate from the next. Smith is interested in how books like The Taqwacores, dealing with multiple themes like religion, nationality, and queerness, can create in-roads to conversations about intersectionality. 

“In the United States, it often feels like when we talk about queerness, that cis, white, gay men dominate the conversation. It’s really important to acknowledge that queerness is a continuum. Whenever we fail to refract queerness through our differences, a lot gets left out,” Smith says.

While Smith’s research aims to provide best practices for educators to facilitate critical classroom conversations through LGBTQ+ literature, challenges to LGBTQ+ curricular inclusion are prevalent. 

Recent legislation, such as Florida’s 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act—and the many states who’ve enacted or are currently proposing similar laws—prohibit and restrict discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in the classroom.

In Smith’s personal experience as an educator, he was once encouraged by his school leadership to introduce the idea of queerness as a theory—not a fact. As a closeted educator at that time, Smith says it was difficult to reconcile how his school could value his professional contributions while invalidating his personal humanity.

“I didn’t stay at that school for the next year,” he says.

When reflecting on the kinds of support teachers may need to continue to teach LGBTQ+ books in the classroom, Smith names the difficulty of our present moment, yet also encourages educators to see their students as part of their support system. He reports that his students were often in the best position to advocate for their classroom conversations with their families. 

“Sometimes they would go back home and be like, ‘Oh no, this isn’t really that big of a deal. It’s Mr. Smith’s class,” Smith says. “They understood teaching isn’t malicious.”

Reaching out to families regularly with positive news is also a practice Smith recommends as a way to ensure teachers can build a positive connection with families, which can be helpful in creating a more productive dialogue should they express concern over LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum. 

“I think that whenever you recognize that a controversial conversation doesn’t have to lead to a dismissal of humanity or other humans, the conversation can go much further,” Smith says. 

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