Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community

Dennis Carlson
Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community

Dennis argues that these practices are increasingly hard to sustain. That public schools are being drawn into the battle brewing between "new right" fundamentalists and progressices in American culture as older forms of community and family are beginning to disappear and cultural diversity is increasing. Within this unsettling context, he wants to suggest that public schools may play an important role in helping build new democratic, muticultural community, one in which sexual identity is recognized, in which inequities are challeneged, and where dialogue across difference replaces silencing and invisibility practices.

"Throughout this century, one of the primary means of ensuring that gayness was an invisible presence in the school was through the dismissal of teachers who were found out to be homosexuals. Early in this century, the dismissal of gay teachers was legitimated as a way of keeping young people from being exposed to improper role models, lechery, and child molestation. "

- where Carlson talks about not allowing gay teachers to me is unfair. Gay were considered to be contagious. I think they shouldn't be labeled. Everyone has their way of teaching but i don't think just because someone's gay makes them not able to. Teaching is a passion, its what someone loves to do, if they're good at it. Any good teacher is a role model. Its not always child molestation, someone who's gay loves someone just like everyone else but its just with the same sex. I don't see the wrong in a gay person teaching.

"As a process of reconstructing the self, coming out also involves adopting a new way of being in the world and a new of way of knowing. Worldviews that normailzing the world and that define homosexual desire as bad or sick must be rejected in the precess. A politicized identity is promoted within the gay community through the use of visible gay icons and symbos such as the rainbow flag and banner, pink triangles and gay churchs, and the quilt of the names project, commemorating those who have deided of aids. "

-i like this part because some people don't realize that it helps people fit in. If someone sees another person who one of these symbols they feel that someone like them is around them and then there's a more comfortbale environment.

"A democratic multicultural education must become a dialogue in which all voices are heard and all truths are understood as partial and positioned. The objective of classroom discourse is thus not so much to achieve consensus on one true or objective depiction of reality but rather to clarify differences and agreements, work toward coalition-building across difference when possbile and build relationships based on caring and equity."

- when Carlson talks at the end of the article about what classrooms should be, I agree with him. Kids shouldn't judge, and they shouldn't be given one side by a parent or parents. Kids also get the wrong message when stoies are told to them. Some see no problem in being gay and others see what their parents believe. What are society should teach kids the truth and all voices to make it right and fair.


I think this was an easy read also. I see he does the What, So What, and Now What clarier then any other article so far. He names the what. He write abouts so what and in the end he says now what and how to fix it.