“It’s important to interrogate our biases and assumptions. And it’s important to remember that kids enact what they experience in the world.”
“We emphasize self-reflection and knowledge building around gender, sexuality, and diversity,” says Sara Staley, who co-founded A Queer Endeavor with Bethy Leonardi to create schools that are safer and more affirming of LGBTQ and gender-expansive youth.
To that end, A Queer Endeavor – housed in the CU-Boulder School of Education, and a grantee of your Community Foundation – partners with educators and school communities “to make ‘unworkable’ the silence that historically has surrounded topics of gender and sexual diversity in education.”
Among the services and resources A Queer Endeavor offers teachers are workshops on how to make classrooms more inclusive, as well as LGBTQ texts for young readers and lesson plans for students at all levels of education. Both Bethy and Sara – secondary school teachers before they went back to school to earn their doctorates, and before they founded A Queer Endeavor – say they never encountered any mention of LGBTQ issues in any of their education programs.
“It’s important to interrogate our biases and assumptions,” says Bethy. “And it’s important to remember that kids enact what they experience in the world.”
Since 2014, the grassroots organization has made great strides toward its mission to contribute to the knowledgebase on gender and sexual diversity-affirming policies and practices in education, inform research and praxis, and engage in broad-based coalition building with a variety of community-based stakeholders. The duo estimates that they’ve worked with some 6K educators to date – in Boulder County, statewide, and beyond – including the Boulder Valley, St. Vrain Valley, Adams 12, Summit, and Milliken school districts.
“Our partnerships are growing and people are reaching out to us,” Sara says. “We’re struck by the commitment of educators across Colorado. They want to do right by our kids.”
Learn more about the important work of A Queer Endeavor in “Breaking the Silence”; this compelling, 22-minute film is part of a package that also comprises three shorter videos meant to extend the conversation (“Teachers and Teacher Education,” “Interrogating Heteronormativity: Climate & Culture,” and “Pedagogy and Practice”).
