Harvard to offer course on 'Queering Education,' focuses on 'young people’s schooling experiences'

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education will offer a spring semester course titled “Queering Education” that will discuss sexuality in children’s education.  

The course, which will run from March 24 to May 2, explores “the role of gender and sexuality in shaping young people’s schooling experiences, opportunities, and outcomes, and the role of schooling experiences in shaping young people’s notions of gender and sexuality.”

More specifically, the course will teach students to understand the supposedly “hidden curriculum” of “heteronormativity and cisnormativity.” The course description alleges that American schools promote “subtle” strategies that “privilege heterosexual, gendered identities and ways of being,” and that “heteronormative schooling” hurts “all students.” 

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According to ScienceDirect, heteronormativity is the belief that “heterosexuality is the norm and all individuals are expected to conform to traditional gender roles and relationships.” 

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines cisnormativity as assuming “that everyone identifies within the gender binary and that people live in the gender they were assigned at birth.”

The course aims to teach students to “[t]alk comfortably about queer history and how it can inform our understanding of schools and schooling,” “identify specific strategies that educators at various levels might use to support students in negotiating gender and sexuality norms,” “identify tools that schools can use to build positive, nurturing environments, which open up possibilities for complex gender and sexual identity development,” and “analyze and evaluate a variety of school practices, curricula, programs, and policies that seek to support healthy gender and sexual identity development for U.S. children and adolescents.”

Intersectionality principles will also motivate the way the course is taught, with participants considering how “other elements of identity” such as “race, culture, [and] socioeconomic status” intersect “with gender and sexuality in the process of identity development.”

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Professor Kimm Topping, who goes by “they/them/theirs” pronouns, will be teaching “Queering Education.” According to her faculty page, she has worked with “schools and organizations on creating more inclusive, liberatory spaces for all LGBTQ+ youth to thrive,” and her research focuses on “gender, sexuality, and equity.”

Campus Reform has reached out to Harvard University and Kimm Topping for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.