LGBTQIA2S+ & Allyship Toolkit: Advocacy

This paper presents a set of testimonies from three LGBTQ families about the advocacy work they took up in their schools. The stories they share are part of an interview study undertaken from 2014-2020. Each family responded to the cisheteronormative cultures of their schools by challenging ideas teachers and principals held about gender, sexuality, and families and some of their everyday practices. The advocacy work the families undertook is discussed through two analytic lenses, the Triangle Model (McCaskell, 2005; Thomas, 1987) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), demonstrating how middle-class economic resources and professional education were key to parents' success.

Although schools are thought to be safe environments for all students, sexual minority and gender expansive (i.e., LGBTQ) students often feel unsafe and unwelcome as a result of misconceptions about their identity. This paper explores eight commonly held myths and misconceptions about LGBTQ youth. The role of professional school counselors (PSCs) in debunking these myths and advocating for these students will be discussed. Implications for practice and future research will be addressed.

This chapter describes how institutions can best use data from the Campus Pride Index, focusing on student recruitment and resource/policy advocacy for LGBTQ constituencies.

Supporting LGBTQ-Inclusive Teaching," the first report of its kind to examine the possibilities inherent in LGBTQ-inclusive materials for training classroom teachers, explores the biggest challenges to creating, implementing, and scaling up this kind of PreK-12 teacher professional learning. It is also the first to consider the opportunities in harnessing digital materials, particularly open educational resources (OER), as tools for helping to overcome those challenges and enabling queer inclusion. Situated within the broader context of culturally responsive teaching (CRT), this report aims to help set a research and practice agenda for education leaders that envisions ways to combine lessons learned from both the LGBTQ advocacy and open education fields.

This study explored the experiences of college staff members engaged in advancing LGBTQ equity at a small fine arts college in the Midwestern United States. This qualitative case study advanced a conceptual framework for queer leadership in higher education. Findings illuminate how campus leaders engaged queer leadership strategies and LGBTQ advocacy to advance LGBTQ equity through college policy and practice. This study reveals rich implications for college administrators and higher education leaders advancing change for LGBTQ equity.

Using a directed form of qualitative research proposed by Mayring, this qualitative study applied Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to examine the efforts of nine self-identified school counselor advocates to advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students. This study is warranted because LGBTQ students commonly experience bullying in the absence of resources while also trying to navigate a new identity. Findings indicated that the work expectations of other school stakeholders, along with the school counselors’ levels of advocacy self-efficacy and exposure to the LGBTQ community, were related to how, when, and why the school counselors advocated for LGBTQ students. We offer future research and practice recommendations to give more voice to LGBTQ students in the current sociopolitical climate.

Outside the immediate classroom setting, efforts within other school spaces also can shape school climate, address inequality, and affect student performance. Nevertheless, in this respect there has been little research on school-based extracurricular groups focused on issues of social inclusion and justice. An exception to this lack of focus has been Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), which promote social inclusion and justice for sexual and gender minority youth (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning youth; LGBTQ) through support, socializing, education, and advocacy. As this literature has matured, we detail and provide examples of the following conceptual and methodological recommendations to address emerging research needs for GSAs: (1) Move from a monolithic to contextualized treatment of GSAs, (2) attend to heterogeneity among members, (3) utilize multiple data sources for triangulation, (4) apply a range of methodological approaches to capitalize on strengths of different designs, (5) collect longitudinal data over short-term and extended time periods, and (6) consider GSAs within a broader umbrella of youth settings. Further, we note ways in which these recommendations apply to other student groups organized around specific sociocultural identities. These advances could produce more comprehensive empirically supported models to guide GSAs and similar groups on how to promote resilience among their diverse members and address broader social issues within their schools.