About the author: After 17 years away, Teresa recently returned to OSU as an instructor in the HDFS department. Previously, Teresa taught for five years in the OSU laboratory preschool – Child Development Center/Head Start program – and has more than 20 cumulative years of university-level teaching experience at multiple institutions, including OSU-Cascades, Washington State University Vancouver, WSU Global Campus, and Central Oregon Community College (COCC). For the past 11 years, she also owned and operated a developmentally-appropriate preschool rooted in social justice in Bend, Oregon.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend Dharma Mizra’s talk on Supporting 2SLGBTQI+ Students In and Outside the College Classroom . She spent time highlighting ways educators can better support and include 2SLGBTQI+ students in our college community. She also provided resources available on our campus and in the broader community. She wrapped up by sharing statistics from the HRC and the Williams Institute on the impacts the Covid Pandemic has had on the lives in 2SLGBTQI+ students. As members of minoritized groups, the data was grim. It highlighted, however, the powerful differences we can make in the lives of our students.
Even though I am member of the 2SLGBTQI+ community, I was still able to take away considerable information to improve my practice, specifically as it related to individual classroom communities. A bit of new learning for me was the acronym QTI+. Mizra highlighted that it represents Queer, Trans, and Intersex+ individuals.
Even though we are only two weeks into the term, I’ve had several students approach me to share their name in Canvas does not match the name they use. I was able to discover that students can change their name-in-use, without having to have a legal name change. This will help students stay safe in our classrooms and in our Canvas spaces.
As someone who is passionate about our evolving language, I was also reminded of different ways to refer to folx when we are talking about physiology and anatomy in our classrooms. Exclusively using ‘men’ and ‘women’ is outdated and incomplete. Following are some different terms I’ve used in my classrooms:
- People with vulvas
- People with testes
- Normatively cis bodies
- People assigned female at birth
- People assigned male at birth
- People born intersex
- Using ‘they’ as a singular pronoun
- Folx
- Y’all (yes, I sound admittedly Southern, but avoid ‘you guys’)
This list is hardly inclusive, but a beginning of more progressive ways of thinking about inclusive language.
In my previous decade as a preschool educator, there were numerous opportunities to consider inclusive language with children. Perhaps you are a parent, a grandparent, or another doting grown-up in a child’s life? Some additional language to consider:
- Children (instead of boys and girls in greeting)
- Grown-up
- Firefighter
- Police officer
- Mail carrier
- Snow people
What are some others you can think of? If you are interested in learning more ways to support young children, consider checking out Welcoming Schools. While primarily for PK-12 educators, there is a lot of information that can be applied in college classrooms.
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