Improving the Lives of LGBTQ+ Students through Educating the Adults in their Lives

by

by : 
Samuel F. Olivia S.

Summary

As queer high schoolers, we both noticed the lack of awareness of the LGBTQ+ community in middle schools. As such, we saw the Social Justice Advanced Authentic Research class as our chance to implement meaningful change within our middle school community. The goal of our project is to increase awareness of the LGBTQ+ community by guiding middle school students in a lesson addressing a literary excerpt featuring queer representation. We have partnered with educators from our local middle school community to present the lesson plan to their classes. In preparation for these presentations, we have prototyped the lesson plan and revised it according to expert feedback. To track our students' understanding, they will participate in a pre and post-survey that will ask them relevant questions to terms introduced in or related to the literary excerpt. Additionally, we will ask them to rate their ability to identify positive and negative representations of the LGBTQ+ community. Our project aims to increase their understanding through the lesson between the two surveys.