University of Michigan center offers $600 'Pronouns 101' training to K-12 public schools
The University of Michigan’s resource for ‘LGBTQIAS2+’ students, the Spectrum Center, offers multiple trainings and workshops in order to "skills to interrupt homophobia and transphobia."
The University of Michigan’s resource center for ‘LGBTQIAS2+’ students, the Spectrum Center, offers multiple trainings and workshops in order to “skills to interrupt homophobia and transphobia.”
The featured trainings are available to U of M students and staff for free. The workshops, “Pronouns 101” and ‘Towards Solidarity: Allyship in Action” are also available for “external educational institutions” such as “other universities and K-12 public schools” for a fee.
”Pronouns 101” is two hours long, and priced at $600.
In the course, attendees will “practice using different sets of pronouns and work on bystander intervention skills.” The course teaches participants “what pronouns are,” “why they are important,” as well as how to “identify the correct pronouns,” and create an “actionable goal related to their increased inclusivity around pronouns.”
”Towards Solidarity: Allyship in Action” is six hours long, and priced at $1800.
The course seeks to “deepen [...] understanding of, and ability to engage with, LGBTQIA2S+ allyship” and “challenge participants to center liberation as they show up actively for LGBTQIA2S+ communities.”
The course intends to “develop their understanding of LGBTQIA2S+ allyship away from “ally” as an identity term and toward [an] active set of practices.” Participants will “gain knowledge about how LGBTQ+ oppression operates.” “identify inclusive practices,” and “commit to the practice of allyship and showing up in solidarity in their personal and professional lives.”
The UMich Spectrum Center website notes that they “are able to accommodate a sliding scale for Minority Serving Institutions such as Tribal Colleges, HSIs, and HBCUs.”
A prerequisite to “Pronouns 101” and “Towards Solidarity: Allyship in Action,” entitled “Introduction to LGBTQIA2S+ Communities and Identities,” “aims to disrupt misinformation you may have encountered, or even internalized, about LGBTQIA2S+ people” according to the website.
Also available are “capacity building consultations” on “how to create an LGBTQIA2S+ affirming student organization, classroom, or workplace environment.”
U-M’s Spectrum Center claims status as the ‘first campus-based office dedicated to “gay and lesbian concerns,” and boasts that “its first staffers were members of the Gay Liberation Front and Radical Lesbians—Jim Toy and Cynthia Gair, respectively.”
The courses available to both UMich students and faculty, as well as public K-12 classrooms and other universities, reflects the university’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and the ‘integrating and infusing [of] DEI values.”
The Spectrum Center’s Transgender Awareness Month events in Fall 2024 were previously covered by Campus Reform.
Campus Reform has reached out to the University of Michigan and the Spectrum Center for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
