UC Berkeley

Teachers can be one of the most powerful factors in creating a safer school culture through intervening when they hear lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) slurs (Bockenek and Brown, 2001; Kosciw et al., 2009). Teachers are the primary adult contact students have throughout their school day, and many teachers hear gay slurs in the classroom and do not intervene. My design study focuses on creating a school culture where teachers intervene when they hear students using LGBT slurs in the classroom or on campus. This study does not focus on attempting to shift the entire school culture within the duration of the design study process but rather begin to acknowledge the critical LGBT issues on campus by addressing gay slurs. This design study is the beginning of a larger school culture change process.

The SHU:SH Project Slurs Hurt Us: Safety and Health - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students at School, a mixed-method study combining qualitative and quantitative methods, begins with identifying the problem of practice: students and teachers hear LGBT slurs on a daily basis in the classroom and hallways. What is problematic about this behavior is that teachers ignore these slurs, tolerate them, and do not intervene when they hear slurs. For this study, I developed a theory of action to guide the design. Drawing from the literature, I identified five key design elements in creating a professional development process by which a school culture is created to enable teachers and staff to intervene when they hear LGBT slurs on campus: create cognitive dissonance and awareness, develop a safe space for conversation and reduce fear and defensiveness while creating responsibility and personalization, acknowledge depth of problem and deepen insight, engage in inquiry cycle while creating action space, and efficacy.

Overall, I found the unpredictability of difficult, volatile, and complex human interactions around social status requires enormously capable leaders (Theoharis, 2007). The local context of silence pervasive in this social justice high school embodied the complexity of addressing slurs. My hope is the next design iteration will focus on self-critical inquiry for social justice leaders, examine the local context of silence, and analyze the effective implementation of theory to practice within social justice initiatives.