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The Herald Scotland

US researcher praises Scotland's LGBT-inclusive education

The Herald on Sunday's education writer speaks to Darek Ciszek, a Social Science and Comparative Education researcher at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) who has been studying the development and impact of LGBT-inclusive education in Scottish schools. Can you start by telling our readers a bit about your background and how an American academic became interested in Scotland's approach to LGBT inclusive education? I'm in a PhD program at UCLA in the School of Education and as I was thinking about my dissertation topic in 2022, Florida passed its Don't Say Gay law. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. I am a former teacher as well, and I taught what would be the equivalent of lower secondary in Scotland – history in particular. When that law passed in Florida, I kind of thought back to my own experience being a teacher in the classroom and bringing up topics around inclusion. I wanted to do something about it, but I didn't quite know what to do without going to Florida and putting up a sign and starting to protest. But I realised that I could potentially do some research around inclusive education from an LGBTQ lens. So that led me to research states around the US that were hopefully going in a different direction in Florida, and I have to admit the search was very sobering. So then I decided to look a little bit wider. I did a Google search, literally, just a Google search of LGBT inclusive education around the world and different countries and things like that. And Scotland came up top of that list. And that is how you learned about Time for Inclusive Education? And at that point, I did not know anything about TIE. I did not know anything about the campaign and the policy around inclusion. I wanted to dig in a little bit more, so clicked on a few more websites which ultimately led me to a CNN or a BBC article or something and TIE was mentioned. I wanted to learn more about what was going on, what they were doing. How did they do this and what does this actually look like on the ground? So I found Liam and Jordan's emails and I contacted them and luckily they responded. We had a Zoom about a month later and I got some funding from UCLA to pursue this research and was out in Scotland that summer. Darek Ciszek (Image: Contributed) What did that first trip over here involve? What did you learn from the visit? By that point I had started to flesh out some research questions, but they were more open-ended because I really did not know what to expect. I knew I wanted to focus on implementation and see how TIE were actually rolling out the policy, and because I'm a former teacher, I wanted to know how they are supporting teachers in this process. So I got to observe some of their CPD sessions around curriculum development and was able to go to a few schools. There were a few teachers that were willing to have me interview them or, if I were back in Scotland, potentially come and observe some of their lessons. I've been out four times in total now. I ended up observing a couple of lessons at a primary school in the Greater Glasgow area. I also went up to another primary school a bit more north and was able to observe TIE's pupil workshops which really have been some of my favourite things that I've observed, not only because of the way that TIE structured it, but also because those workshops really do address some really important issues facing kids in schools around homophobia, language, stereotypes, and thinking about inclusion and diversity in a broader societal context. I went back to that school a couple of months later to observe another lesson that one of the school leaders there had crafted along with the teacher for a P7 class around inclusion. So I got to sort of see how they're implementing TIE's curriculum materials from the website that they have, for example the ready-made lessons, but how they also add a little bit of their own context and school perspective. I've been able to go to a couple of secondary schools as well. Those were more focused around like interviewing staff but I did observe a few lessons that were really interesting. These lessons have now been going on for a few years, but what was it about the learning that really stood out to you? By that point my research lens for the work had shifted more to look at how LGBTQ inclusive education helps facilitate students' social emotional learning. That really became my core question. I'm trying to gauge how the curriculum material - the actual language and the lesson plans and the selection of books - is speaking to social-emotional skills development. So for example, the workshops are fantastic for this because they use these vignettes or like scenario-based learning examples with fictional student characters. They have different scenarios with kids that are being made fun of for a variety of reasons in the school context. READ MORE Maybe it's a girl that wants to play football, and that doesn't fall within the sort of the gender stereotype for a female. Or it's a boy who's playing football and is concerned about coming out because he's gay, and how his friends and peers and teammates will react to that. When you present that material to a classroom of students you're asking them to engage in perspective-taking, to engage in emotional recognition, to develop empathy skills through those situational contexts. The wonderful thing about upper primary is that in every classroom I went into kids were just like raising their hands all the time. They just wanted to engage, they wanted to ask questions. So from what you've seen through your research, it's not as if these children, even fairly young ones, are being thrown into a topic that they're not ready for? They have quite a bit of knowledge going into that classroom to begin with from things that pick up from family and friends and social media et cetera. So it's not a blank slate in terms of information. But at least in this context, in these workshops, they had a safe, age-appropriate environment in which to engage in that conversation and have some of their questions answered with an adult, right? With an educator present. One theme that kind of bubbled up in my interviews was the secondary school staff telling me that this really has to happen at the primary level because by the time they move up it's twice as difficult – by then some of these habits and behavioural expectations, for example around what boys versus girls should be doing et cetera, are much more ingrained. With the primary school teachers that I observed, whenever they introduced a lesson that was LGBTQ inclusive, it was always in the context of a broader theme. So for example, it could be a week where they talked about different cultures. It could be building on something they talked about earlier in the year around like human rights, for example, or information about the United Nations or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. But the information wasn't so left field, so out of the blue, that the kids were like, wait, how did we get here? I could tell based on how they were asking questions, and the kinds of conversation happening at the classroom level, that this wasn't the first time that they were talking about inclusion in this context - it was just another opportunity to do it and get some more information or learn through a different book or a different kind of lesson. So is it really accurate to say that Scotland has established, and is implementing, a world-first LGBT-inclusive curriculum? Based on what I've seen, I would say it's accurate. I will caveat that a little bit though and say that I think in most cases the individuals leading the charge around this at those schools also happen to be a part of the LGBTQ community. On the one hand it makes sense to me because if I were a teacher in that context I would probably pick this up for my school and sort of be the main facilitator and coordinator, helping other teachers think about implementation, getting TIE to come out to our school, doing the CPD et cetera. But not every school in Scotland might have that individual to sort of lead the charge. And so there's an element of how do you make this more scalable and sustainable for individuals that are not a part of the community, and really do care about these issues, but for whatever reason may feel reluctant or concerned about taking that stuff on. One key thing is framing: what is the justification for LGBT inclusive education? And this is something I'm dealing with in my dissertation. There's a lot of literature out there around the justification being that it's about equality and about rights and those sorts of aspects. I totally agree, and have heard and adopted that argument for quite a long time. But I think where I'm not seeing as much focus is the social-emotional, skills development perspective. That really benefits not just LGBTQ kids who might be struggling emotionally and mentally, but also heterosexual students in terms of their own ability to engage with a diverse society. Based on your experiences, does Scotland's approach to this issue seem like something that is worth celebrating? Oh yeah, absolutely. I was just in Barcelona for an LGBTQ education conference, and it was a consortium of a whole bunch of different NGOs and non-profits, the Council of Europe, European Parliament, World Bank. What Scotland is doing is being eclipsed by the UK as a whole, and the UK as a whole is being represented by England. Not enough people around the world know what Scotland is doing. And they need to know.