Our children are your students: LGBTQ families speak out

Although there are many teaching resources to help educators understand the reality of LGBTQ families and their children, Tara Goldstein’s newest book, constructed on the narratives of such families and their experiences, struggles, and successes, has a lot to teach us on how to create an educational system that is more just and equitable. During the past two academic years I have sought to incorporate content on LGBTQ families and children in a study unit on sexuality and the curriculum at the University of Malta, which unit is intended for preschool teachers and Learning Support Educators. To this end, Goldstein’s book, Our Children Are Your Students: LGBTQ Families Speak Out (2021), has proven extremely informative and accessible to discuss aspects of this often neglected element in pedagogy. Goldstein is professor on Gender, Sexuality and Schooling at the Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. She is also an ethnographer and a play writer. The book features discussions from thirty-seven interviews that Tara Goldstein and her team conducted between 2014 and 2020 with LGBTQ families. Goldstein’s book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, titled ‘From Anonymity to Testimony and Autobiography’ Goldstein departs from an explanation why the inclusion of LGBTQ parents is a matter of human rights, while ideologically locating cycles of oppression and discrimination within individual and institutional practices which need to be countered through experiences (p. 19). Goldstein used to endorse a pedagogy of anonymity, one which allowed her to break the silences of homophobia and transphobia in the classroom by encouraging students to express themselves ‘through anonymous response writing’ (p. 123). This eventually led her to develop a pedagogy of testimony and autobiography, the former being ‘the stories people tell about their experiences [and] linked to a group or community experiencing marginalization and oppression’ (Crosby & Brinton, 2019, p. 233). These stories were autobiographies when they were not communally linked (Goldstein, 2021, p. 22). More multimodal in style, the second chapter of the book is titled ‘This is our Family: A Verbatim Theatre Piece’ and consists of a play with twenty-one scenes of monologue and dialogue, a series of projected images, and three original songs by team member Kate Reid (p. 41). Ryan, one of the actors in the play, conveys the narrative intentions clearly when he says that ‘[t]hrough this play, each of us are embodying people of different backgrounds, nations, identities and experiences that are not their own.’ Thus, ‘polyfidelitous’ families with three or more parents (p. 51) are protagonists in Scene 1, while Scene 3 speaks of the importance to be ‘constantly