“The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.”
Tara Westover, Educated
Last week I finished reading the book Educated by Tara Westover. It’s a totally fascinating example of what can happen when an individual isn’t exposed to ‘formal’ education and really got me thinking about our role as teachers. Yes, we exhaust ourselves looking for strategies to ‘close the attainment gap’, to get our reluctant readers devouring a novel, to help our most stubborn pupils see the point in learning how to calculate a percentage of a number.
Yet a core part of our job is preparing young people to go out into society as an embodiment of the four capacities. We’re preparing them to understand a world that is rapidly changing and I would imagine that this preparation can look very different depending on the context of the community that we’re working in. I can identify many situations over the past year when I’ve realised that I’m slightly out of touch with the issues facing young people today.
With that in mind, my possible lines of enquiry are:
- How do primary schools create an LGBT inclusive environment?
- What happens when schools begin to examine the role of gender in education?
- In what ways can primary schools educate pupils on issues faced by the LGBT community?
I know that many high schools are doing wonderful work around LGBT awareness. I’ve yet to find many examples of how Scottish primary schools are doing the same kind of work, which makes me keen to use this as my area of focus. I’ll be leading the school in working toward achieving our LGBT Schools Charter Award so I’ll have something to structure my enquiry around.
If you know of any primary schools doing work in this area, please let me know in the comments section.
Here are some links to material that I found useful:
Interesting article from The Guardian about gender in schools
BBC Panorama episode about the LGBT debate in English schools
And finally, this tweet from comedian Joe Lycett that always makes me chuckle
L x
