FEATURE
SUPPORTING GENDER DIVERSITY IN THE CLASSROOM Partnership between Egale and OECTA provides tools for safer schools By Alyx Duffy
Trans – what does this word mean to you? Have you met anyone who identifies this way? What about Transgender, Genderqueer, or Gender Diverse? For many, these words may seem unfamiliar or confusing, but it’s almost certain that during your career as an Ontario Catholic teacher you’ve taught a student, or worked alongside colleagues, who could use these words to identify their gender identity.
Understanding the meaning of terms like these is one element of Draw the Line – Against Transphobic Violence, a public education project offering resources to educators and students on how to intervene in instances of sexual and transphobic violence, with the ultimate goal of creating safer and more inclusive school communities. With Draw the Line lesson plans, resource guides, and workshops available now to OECTA members, the tools for change are literally a few keystrokes away at DTL.Egale.ca. Draw the Line – Against Transphobic Violence (or DTL – ATV) is a project of Egale Canada Human Rights Trust,
Canada’s LGBTQ human rights organization, and is funded by the Ontario Women’s Directorate as part of the Draw the Line Campaign. At the root of the project is a need to encourage youth engagement and build their capacity to intervene effectively in instances of sexual and transphobic violence that occur at staggering rates in Canadian schools. Egale’s 2011 report Every Class in Every School showed that 90 per cent of trans secondary students reported hearing transphobic comments daily or weekly from other students, while 23 per cent heard the same from their teachers. Furthermore, almost three-quarters (74 per cent) of trans students reported being verbally harassed about their gender expression, and 25 per cent reported physical harassment because of being LGBTQ. While the impact of violence and discrimination on trans students is multi-fold, it’s
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@ OECTA
| FEBRUARY 2017
DTL – ATV materials are available for free download via DTL.Egale.ca. Please note that these materials are for your personal use only. You must have written permission from your school administration to use them in the classroom.
telling that 15 per cent reported skipping school for more than 10 days because of feeling unsafe. Extensive and ongoing commitments are required from all within the education sector to help address these trends and create safer and more inclusive schools. Since 2012, OECTA has been in partnership with Egale to provide provincewide training on LGBTQ inclusion through a workshop called “Reaching Every Student: Building Safer and Accepting School Environments for LGBTQ Students in Catholic Schools.” This highly successful project has worked with nearly every local OECTA unit, as well as numerous Catholic school boards and faculties of education with a Catholic stream. Egale is now rolling out a new set of resources, which will become available in all publicly funded schools in Ontario. The DTL – ATV project offers a suite of tools to help bring discussion around gender identity