Majority of Illinois Colleges and Universities Flunk LGBTQ Equity

Chicago - The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance (the Alliance) just released Visibility Matters, the first statewide report card on LGBTQ presence in higher education and teacher preparation in Illinois. This landmark report examines the inclusion of sexual orientation (SO) and gender identity (GI) in university policies related to anti-discrimination and in student codes of conduct, and for SO and GI specifically in teacher education programs. Seventy-two percent, or forty-one out the state’s fifty-seven teacher education preparation programs, received a failing grade of F.

“Our taskforce is composed of researchers and scholars from Illinois universities,” states Associate Professor Erica Meiners, Professor of Education and Women’s Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and member of the Pre-Professional Project of the Alliance that authored the report. “We evaluated these programs based on the web because prospective teacher education students research potential programs via the internet and want to know how programs include and address LGBTQ communities.”

The report will be sent to university and college presidents across the state, and to the heads of teacher preparation programs.

“This project,” states Therese Quinn, Associate Professor of Education at the School of the Art Institute and member of the Pre-Professional Project, “aims to educate universities and colleges across Illinois that LGBTQ visibility and policies matter. We welcome amendments to this report. We are not interested in failing grades as an end-point; instead, this report shows where institutions can improve.”

The report offers a number of recommendations to improve grades, to strengthen policies and to increase LGBTQ visibility. Stacey Horn, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the sole institution to receive an A, acknowledges that, “We expect teacher education programs to address all components of diversity – race, gender, ethnicity – and that sexual orientation and gender identity are also important aspects of the diversity picture.”

The full report, Visibility Matters: Higher Education and Teacher Preparation in Illinois: A Web-based Assessment of LGBTQ Presence, is available online here.

Gallery 37 and Censorship of Student Art

Tomi Mick, a home-schooled high school-age student was taking AP photo classes at Gallery 37, called a protest for Dec. 19, when her photos, a series exploring female bodies at different ages, was censored from the final exhibition. The protest was organized by Females United for Action (FUFA), a Chicago-wide social change organization for people who identify as young women and gender-queer/ gender-neutral youth, with the leadership of youth of color at the center of their organizing. FUFA is a sister group of Women and Girls Collective Action Network. Here, Tomi shows her censored art in front of Gallery 37. Students going and going from classes in the building were overwhelmingly supportive of Tomi and FUFA’s requests that Gallery 37:

• Educate students and parents about the need for freedom of artistic expression;
• Clearly outline its art-making boundaries;
• Meet with youth from FUFA to discuss setting a policy welcoming thought-provoking art and young feminist visibility.

These seem like reasonable, even fairly mild, requests.

Here is Tomi’s statement about what happened to her:

Gallery 37 in downtown Chicago, Illinois has a very prestigious AP art program for high school juniors and seniors looking to advance in their art career and prepare AP portfolios. They advertise their students as "the best of the best," and once inside, they force us through tons of college prep workshops and encourage us to apply to at least 10 art schools each.

I auditioned for and was admitted to the AP Photographic Explorations program. As a photography student of two years (this being my third), I was ready to explore my ideas and find my artistic concentration. Recently I've been working on images that portray women in un-conventional ways in order to challenge common ideas about the female body. I created an unfinished piece of my little sister, me, and my mother, neck to belly-button, nude. The photos are created to sit next to each other in chronological order. They are supposed to demonstrate the differences in our bodies due to age, development, shape, body-type, etc. I was hoping to post the series in this Friday's end of the semester's art show. My teacher, Mr. Cinoman, was with me all the way. He supported me when my idea was just an idea, and he supported me once it was executed. Monday, 4 days before the show, Mr. Cinoman tells me that he decided that my piece was too controversial to display, and that I would not be able to put them in the show. He also refused to give me my prints until the end of the two-hour period, after I said that I was leaving and not coming back.

There were never any written or verbal rules explaining what the boundaries were at Gallery 37, and as I said before, my teacher supported me until he had time to think about "the conservative Hispanic parents" that would be attending the show (Yes, he really said that).

Art is supposed to be controversial. We can't stand for this type of censorship of arts, especially the body-positive feminist kind. :) Who knows how many young artists have lost the desire to make art after encountering programs like this?

There’s a lot packed into Tomi’s analysis, but the bottom line is that a young woman lost a chance to show her art and get real feedback from an audience. But Tomi and FUFA turned this into a “teachable moment” anyway. Good for them. But too bad for all the rest of Gallery 37’s students that the organization, or perhaps just one teacher, couldn’t figure out how to educate by showing this work.

Making Chicago’s Schools Safer for All: Gardens, Solidarity and Social Justice

Before it went belly-up, Chicago’s nascent gay-and-allies high school was known as Social Justice Pride Campus, then, in an apparent attempt to gain broader support, it took on the name Social Justice Solidarity Campus. The former name—Pride—was the inaugural version; the planners switched to the latter—Solidarity—after encountering opposition, notably by evangelical ministers. The shift in nomenclature is telling; the school’s planners always seemed stuck somewhere between missions—were they about fostering gay pride or developing between-group solidarity? And, as seems likely, were they trying to mollify the wrong folks? After all, these ministers think queers are doing “the work of the devil.” Why try to reason with that?

Queer youth suffer in many schools, that’s for sure. But I still have questions: Will the goal of safety for gender and sexual minority youth be best achieved through the establishment of one school or the enforcement of the city’s already strong anti-discrimination policies? What about providing education toward justice for queer youth across city schools? Remember when Billie Jean King donated $10,000 to provide copies of the film It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School to every school in Chicago? What would happen if Duncan and Daley required these schools to show the film and discuss the “issues”? Can schools be made safer across the board, say, by repairing every broken window, boiler, and plaster wall, filling classrooms with art, plants, books, and computers, inviting neighbors to visit classes and plant school gardens, and strongly representing love and respect for every person in the building and community, so that all kids flourish? Bigger vision, bigger results.

Let’s refuse to let Daley spend a penny on the Olympics before every child is safe in every Chicago school.

And every school has a garden.

Jihad for Love at Senn High School

Gay Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma visited Nicholas Senn High School and showed his film, Jihad for Love. In this picture, Senn LSC member, student Umme Rubab, listens to a student’s comment. Over 70 IB, GSA and other Senn students attended, along with some community members, teachers and others. We loved the talk and film; Sharma is funny and generous—he stayed after the screening for over an hour to answer every question students asked, and gave us all a tutorial in Islamic precepts. He also invited students to continue the dialogue about Islamophobia and homophobia at the film’s blog.

Another great event at a school that everyone should know about.

Statement of Support for Professor William Ayers

October 14, 2008

We, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Education Alumni Board, write to champion our colleague Professor William Ayers। A purpose of our Alumni Association is to “support the College’s mission of ensuring that all children and youth in America’s urban schools receive a quality education।” This charge describes Dr. Ayers’ contributions in our field and to Chicago; his work toward that end has been unceasing.

Dr। Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a nationally known scholar, member of the Faculty Senate at UIC, Vice President-elect of the American Educational Research Association, and a sought after speaker and visiting scholar at other universities. Throughout his twenty years as a valued faculty member at UIC, Dr. Ayers has taught, advised, mentored, and supported hundreds of undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D. students. Helping educators develop the capacity and ethical commitment to promote critical inquiry, dialogue, and debate; to encourage questioning and independent thinking; and to value the full humanity of every person and to work for access and equity are Professor Ayers’ essential commitments. His unflagging dedication to these goals is an inspiration to College of Education students and alumni.

We reject the recent and ongoing derogations of his character in the media and blogosphere, and by politicians, and stand beside Professor William Ayers, an advocate for education devoted to human enlightenment and liberation. That goal is also ours.

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Education Alumni Board

Contacts:
Patrick O’Reilly, Vice President of UIC COE Alumni Board
Therese Quinn, Ph. D., Member of UIC COE Alumni Board

The Bill Ayers I Know

Teaching for Social Justice, or Passing the Gift Along

Bill Ayers, in all of his life’s work, within and outside of the field of education—for he is active much more broadly—has embraced what Maxine Greene describes as the “difficult matter of moral choice.” Bill includes this quote in one of his finest books—To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher—a teaching memoir and guide, which is widely used in teacher education courses and certification programs, including my own at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In it, Bill writes that students must be fully seen by their teachers, of the power of observation, of teachers as detectives. He speaks of teaching as being fundamentally about love.

Lewis Hyde, the author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, too, speaks of love, or more precisely, of eros, and its relation to gifts and to art. Gift exchange is, he says, an erotic commerce. Eros is the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together, while logos, reason and logic, and differentiation, is exemplified by the market economy. And he claims that, in his words, “a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.” And to that I’ll add this spin—it is the quality of gift that makes the teacher.

This is, I think, what Bill Ayers offers the field, and the world, a committed, activist, love-infused and hopeful vision of teaching, that is grounded, against the grain of governmental push and current trend, not-at-all in the interests of the market, but rather, in the specific lives of particular children, and is all about, as he has written, teaching in “the hope of making the world a better place.” These considerations are evident in all his writings, which emphasize the importance of listening to those who have witnessed and experienced—hence his interest in autobiography and children’s voices, and work on student lore and teacher lore, projects developed with another wonderful Bill, William Schubert.

Here, I’m following Bill’s lead once again, by turning to an autobiographical reflection on access and “moral choice.” My real educational journey began in libraries and bookstores—places that were simply open, and let me wander through, grazing the fantasy shelf in the children’s room, as well as cruising the adult stacks. I foundered in school; junior high was difficult and high school was even worse, especially after I “came out” as a lesbian. But a high school history teacher’s kind decision to count as a class project an extracurricular poetry reading I participated in allowed me to graduate. He made what must have been a complicated decision—a moral choice of the sort Bill Ayers describes, and commends.

Graduation allowed me to continue. And I eventually enrolled in a city college where I began to study art. I still loved libraries (I scoured them for queer authors, looking for family; I found Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, and Sappho) but was critical of and estranged from formal education and its narrow priorities (I primarily used school as a way to survive—financial aid and work study jobs).

Eventually I completed an AA degree. Because I was living in California I was then able to enter a state university without passing through the grinder of SATS. I finally completed my undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at age 29 or 30, and started working in museums with so many other artists. It was during that time that I met Bill Ayers, when I was invited, with a selection of other city-and-culture engaged folks, to speak to one of his classes of pre-service teachers. I urged them to use and also to critique museums; Bill urged me to come back to school for a Ph.D. The idea surprised me into seeing myself differently, and a decade later, in 2001, I completed that degree.

I gave a talk recently that I titled, “Growing Marigolds by Moonlight, or, Why Aren’t Museums Libraries?” That wasn’t what I titled my dissertation, but that’s basically what it considers—why museums aren’t accessible and how they could open up. Growing Marigolds By Moonlight is the title of a book written by an old woman in San Francisco that was accessioned into a very public library in that city, one dreamed up and described by writer Richard Brautigan in his novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966. The library welcomed books written by everyone—any person could leave their stories on its shelves. Any people could read them. It was a library even better than the ones that supported my curiosities as a child and helped me survive as a gay teen. That’s the kind of museum-as-library I imagine these days, an institution fractured open. Even an old woman living in a small apartment in the Tenderloin, or Uptown, should be able to display her insights there, for us all to appreciate. That’s my specific vision, shaped by my experiences and abiding passions. But its undergirding, its girdle, I want to say, what surrounds it and supports it, in a kind of firmly erotic way, is the gift passed to me by Bill. Enter the conversation, he said, just enter. And I did.

References
Ayers, W. (1993). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. New York: Teachers College Press.

Brautigan, R. (1971). The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hyde, L. (1983, 1980, 1979). The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books.

Pinar, W., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P. & Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang.

Queers, Safety, and Schools

A proposal for Pride Campus, an open admission public high school that will implement a college prep curriculum in all subject areas, was approved by the CPS Office of New Schools last week. The school will serve LGBTQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, questioning and allied, according to the school’s planners) students from all over the city.

The Greater Lawndale Little Village School for Social Justice submitted the proposal to the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Office of New Schools for the Social Justice High School-Pride Campus.

A CPS community hearing about Pride Campus will be held Thursday, Sept. 18, 6-8 PM, 2008 at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted. If, after the hearing, CPS gives the school its final approval, Pride Campus will open in 2010. No location has been selected for Pride Campus yet.

I have to admit I have mixed feelings about the school. I understand that schools can be lethal and are often dangerous and scary for queer and queerish kids; all the stats support that. And as a girl who liked to hold hands with other girls, hung out with drama-kids, and dressed like a freak in high school, I was called dyke and other lesbian-baiting names, shoved into lockers, and had bottles thrown at me; I hated most of my time at high school (I always loved drama club), barely graduated, and would have gladly escaped to another, safer, place if one had been available.

I became an educator, in part, to create schools that are not just healthy and safe places for all students, but joyous, art-rich, and vibrant zones where all kinds of people encounter and learn about and from each other. I know this is possible, and it is public education at its best. From this perspective, the idea of a Pride Campus prompts questions:

• With the advent of Pride, what happens to the queer and otherwise non-conforming kids left behind in all the other schools? Shame?
• Will Pride Campus let CPS continue to avoid really making sure all schools respect and care for all students?
• Will schools push their trannies, fags, and dykes out to Pride Campus, rather than work with their teachers, parents and students to develop an inclusive educational culture?
• Is the school a retreat, really, an admission of systemic failure to love our queer youth?

It seems to me that Pride Campus is still a “choice” school, one that plays to the fantasy that we can all just choose our ways into better situations, and those left behind, who just didn’t choose as well as we, aren’t our concern. It’s exclusionary, in this case, not because it requires high SATs or signed contracts for admission, but because it asks for a declaration of identity/affiliation that many youth just can’t make.

If we have given up on the big job of building a society, or even a city school system, that actively recognizes everyone’s rights, why settle for a queer day campus? Maybe we should demand a Pride Boarding School, a 24 hour safe zone, a home for all the LGBTQ kids thrown out by parents, forced to attend “ex-gay” Christian camps, afflicted by abstinence programs that ignore their existence, subjected to “marriage is for a man and a woman” speeches by politicians and preachers. Let’s make it big, let’s take over city hall, hey, how about declaring the whole city a Pride Campus?