High School Students Explore Effects of Homophobia

Elkhorn Area (Wisconsin) High School (Home of the Fighting Elks!) teacher Sarah Arnold is making news this week for designing and teaching an 37-day unit on hidden homophobia for her 11th grade English students. Since others have handled the predictable kerfuffle raised by the anti-gay crowd, I decided to take a closer look at the unit itself.

What I found was an impressive tool for teaching not just tolerance and acceptance of others, but a guide to critical thinking that will be an asset to Ms. Arnold’s students for the rest of their lives.

According to Teaching Tolerance (where the entire unit plan has been made available), the unit began with an essay on what makes each student different in some way. This was followed by a screening of the Oscar-winning 1994 short film Trevor ¹, one that I must confess I’ve still not seen. Arnold’s students went on to view and discuss PBS’s The Life and Death of Billy Jack Gaither, CBS’s Gay or Straight?, MTV’s True Life: Gay Parents, Race, Gender, and Sexuality, and HBO’s The Laramie Project. All of these were viewed in the classroom followed by group discussion and essays.

There was also required reading, such as the short story A Rose for Charlie and a choice of novels including Alone in the Trenches, Geography Club, and So Hard to Say, with in-depth discussion for each.

Ms. Arnold also led the class through other academic exercises, such as a massive portfolio project and an exploration of G.W. Allport’s Five Levels of Prejudice:

Allport defined five ways that prejudice can be expressed or acted upon. These five types of prejudiced action are :

1. Antilocution (name calling, stereotyping)
2. Avoidance (defamation by omission, exclusion)
3. Discrimination (refusal of service, denial of opportunity)
4. Physical Attack (threat of physical violence, murder)
5. Extermination (mass assassination, genocide)

One vital detail I noticed is that none of the resources used were religious in nature. Ms. Arnold didn’t include, for example, Mel White‘s Stranger at the Gate. By doing this, Ms. Arnold removed many of the religious objections and focused on the sociological aspect of the discussion. I think that given the public school setting, that was a wonderful decision.

So kudos to Sarah Arnold. She took a huge risk with a huge potential pay off. Again, Ms. Arnold’s entire eight-week unit plan is now available at Teaching Tolerance.

¹ This film led to the formation of The Trevor Project, a suicide hotline for LGBT youth. ⇧