Directive Urges English Teachers to Push Students to Question Their Gender

The National Council of Teachers of English believes teachers should work to promote “gender nonconforming” people and their issues in public school lesson plans.

A NCTE resolution passed in 2007 urges more teachers and teacher training programs to focus on LGBT issues, and to “publish guidelines and instructional materials and offer professional development opportunities designed to assist teachers in their teaching of LGBT issues,” according to the NCTE site.

To that end, NCTE recently posted a new “Diverse Gender Expression and Gender Non-Conforming Curriculum in English Grades 7-12” to promote an “equitable focus on issues honoring a range of diverse expressions related to gender and gender non-conformity.”

The goal of the guide is apparently to convince students to view the world through the eyes of someone who’s not sexually normal. Reading literature to students with gay or gender nonconforming characters isn’t enough, according to a NCTE blog.

The blog cited an English Journal article that alleges “heterosexism and homophobia are already part of the classroom, so we’ll need to use a variety of strategies to counter these beliefs as we introduce LGBTQ texts.” (Read more from “Directive Urges English Teachers to Push Students to Question Their Gender” HERE)

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