URBANA, Ill. – 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.

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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.”

That’s where the NCTE guide comes in.

Suggestions for making English more gay-friendly:

Position your students as LGBT people or their straight allies. They are likely being positioned as straight and/or homophobic in most other parts of their lives (e.g., the English teacher who describes to her students the male protagonist in a story as “every girl’s dream,” or the football coach who refers to his players as “a bunch of girls”).

When students position themselves as homophobic, introduce them to other possible positionings by reading LGBT-themed literature with them.

Read LGBT-themed literature with students across the school year in association with a variety of topics and units.

Include a wide range of literature that works to serve as mirrors and windows for diverse students.

Choose literature that does not just make homosexuality visible, but also shows queer people in queer communities; young people need to know that being gay does not mean being alone.

Choose high-quality, pleasurable YA literature, and involve students in making those choices.

Invite a wide range of ways to respond to this literature.

Work with like-minded colleagues to recognize and challenge each other’s biases and to support one another to use LGBTQ literature.

Engage in the perpetual process of making educational contexts more LGBTQ-friendly every day.

In the end, “by learning to read through a gendered lens and by posing challenges to the gender binary, students become consciously aware of gendered constructions of identity and their role as both consumers and possible producers of meaning,” the guide alleges.

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“This act is potentially liberating for students who develop habits of mind that provide them with the opportunity to engage more completely with their worlds.”

The overall goal is to encourage students to question their beliefs on gender – particularly the stodgy boy, girl “binary” gender roles – and to embrace a new way of thinking that involves all sorts of other “genders” like transgender, gay, lesbian, gender fluid, or other newfangled self-professed identities.

“We envision pedagogy that provides students with opportunities to examine issues of gender in their own lives as well as the literature they are reading,” according to the NCTE guide.