Teacher Responses to Heritage against Homophobia

Last week, we published an article which contained student responses about acceptance around LGBTQ+ students for International Day Against Homophobia. In this article, Ariana ma’am, the Head SEL, comments on what the school is doing regarding such issues, the responsibility that adults have, and what more the school can do to build acceptance.

Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Are you aware of any measures that are in place to support queer students? Should these kinds of structures be there?

For students who experience cases of sexual harassment or discrimination, there are structures in place to report those but there isn’t, as far as I know, support structures that target addressing LGBTQ+ needs. I do think there should be training and sensitization of all the adults in the community around how to address these issues if they come up. I think the main piece that can be there from the beginning, which we’re working on actually, is proactivity, which we’re working on with rebuilding the library, some of the work that we do on Social Emotional Learning. We are beginning to become a lot more proactive, by gathering children’s books that allow for sensitization to be started at a younger age.

Some of these issues come up because kids see it as weird or different but that doesn’t need to be the case. If kids are reading books which have kids with two moms or a boy who likes to dress up as a princess, kids who are questioning gender norms and stereotypes, adults who are showing us that there are a lot of ways to showcase love and create loving partnerships. I think the more we do that on the front end with little kids and the more teachers get comfortable doing that, the more that we’ll see a change in older grades as well.

Do you think that queer students feel supported by teachers and counsellors? How can the school help enable teachers and counsellors to do so? How can you personally support them?

My best guess would be, no. I’ve spoken to a few students who are to varying degrees comfortable sharing that they don’t fit within heterosexual norms. They’re out to some people, but it’s not something that they’re comfortable with publicly acknowledging, which is completely understandable, but there is certainly a lot of scope to ensure that students feel more supported. That starts with adults receiving more training and right now our sexuality education really talks about these things as a “phase”, and that’s a really damaging thing to say because it’s like saying “oh it’s just a phase so you don’t have to worry about it and if it’s not then we’ll get to that when it happens. The underlying message here is that “it’s a problem but let’s hope that it doesn’t last.

Apart from teachers, what can the school do to help students be more sensitive about these issues?

We’ve started introducing this stuff in the curriculum in 9th grade. It’s in the really beginning stages and it’s nowhere close to being enough, but at least having 9th graders learn pretty extensively the difference between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation, and begin to understand the different stereotypes and the damage they do when we put each other in these boxes. It takes a level of rigour because there are multiple components; one, people tease things that are just the common thing to tease about without realising the damage it does, so students have to learn that.

Secondly, students often times tease about things which they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. People often think that homophobia is completely different from sexism, but really there’s a lot of overlap between the two. What keeps male bonding in place is homophobia and sexism. They’re not different or exclusive of one another. They exist in a world of patriarchy.

So, the steps would be, one, to help undo some of the toxic male socialisation. When you do that, you start having students bond with each other on levels apart from sexism and homophobia because that’s a key way of bonding and making jokes.

Another way would be if we have more adults in the community who are role models, bringing in outside activists and have them talk about their experiences, and lifting up their voices.

A lot of kids don’t realise that their peers are shamed into not being able to love who they love, and they don’t realise the damage it’s doing so kids need to realise that. There’s a lot of different things that we need to do better.”

Ariana ma’am also comments on what the school has begun doing in different boards and grades.

We’ve begun experimenting with how each grade has a specific theme so the theme for 9th grade is gender identity and social constructs. We wanted to use those as targeted opportunities to fill in some gaps that the CBSE curriculum has, so at least we’re teaching them this stuff even though it’s not included in the textbook.

For the IB curriculum, the hope is that this stuff can be more subject integrated, because this stuff can be done inside of global perspectives or political science or history or english. I think the reason we haven’t done this stuff in the IB curriculum is because IB has more flexibility to do these things in the curriculum, but it is their responsibility to ensure it is a part of the syllabus.

We've been doing samvaads around gender. We really want to teach them about the toxicity associated with the “ideal woman” and “be a man” ideals that we have. We unpack gender and abuses and what it means to be a man or woman, so when they start discussing sexuality, they already have a baseline. We've begun to do the work, but it has to be something that every person in the community says, “this is valuable and this is enough.” Right now, we need to do a lot more though. Ultimately, it’ll all come from students and the more students that are teaching the teachers about this, the better.

Creating parent workshops is also extremely important, because it’s not enough for a few adults in the system to be aware and accepting. People have to see that this is stuff that students are facing on a daily basis, and we also need more data about these issues. By doing this, we can show the teaching community that this is the number of students we are failing to serve and help.

From the responses that we collected from the students and teachers, it is evident that even though the school has become more proactive in bringing about acceptance, there is a long way to go.