The Census Bureau estimates that up to 14 million children under the age of 18 are being raised by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) families. Just as heterosexual families require child care to enable work and want high-quality early childhood education to enhance their children's development, LGBT families experience the same needs and desires for their children. However, similar to other educational institutions, the early childhood field has either held negative beliefs regarding diverse family structures or ignored the unique needs of LGBT families. As part of an effort to address teachers' understandings of equity, faculty at a southeastern university sponsored a course designed to prepare early childhood teacher education students to offer welcoming, inclusive learning environments for LGBT families and their young children. The purpose of this article is to examine the learning process and transformation of students in this course. Findings from quantitative and qualitative data are presented, as is a discussion on how courses on family equity can and should be incorporated into teacher education programs.
Article:As part of an effort to invest curricular time in building dispositions of compassion, understanding, equity, and justice related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals, faculty at a southeastern university sponsored a course designed to prepare early childhood teacher education students to offer welcoming, inclusive learning environments for LGBT families and their young children. This institution exists in a social-historical landscape of competing and overlapping cultural discourses of civility, religious and political conservatism, struggle for civil and economic rights, homophobia, and progressive resistance (Chafe, 1980;Segrest, 1985). In this context, the process of expanding the university curriculum to
Homophobia in Early Childhood EducationUnfortunately, the field of early childhood education is no exception to the sociocultural trend toward exclusion and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and families. According to Derman-Sparks,
