Discussion

Share your stories, ideas, and concerns as they pertain to recognizing and intervening against homophobia in your school environment.

A Discussion Forum is available at Yahoo for networking and collaboration among users of this workshop.


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Discussion Guidelines

This workshop is grounded in the view that we are all experts on homophobia from our social conditioning. Our common purpose here is to organize the knowledge we share into tools for intervening against homophobia in the school setting.

We will be drawing on and sharing our personal experience and we will respect the personal experience of all participants.

We will respect political choices reflected in language. We will respect each others’ choice of words though they may be different than our own. This holds so long as words are used in good faith and not pejoratively. And we will not enter into discussion of political positions regarding these choices in this workshop.

We will be open to each others’ thoughts and feelings, even if they differ significantly from our own.*

We will respect that we are all here to learn. There are no wrong questions. We are all products of a homophobic, sexist, and racist society and our expressions may reflect that fact. We are not responsible for the conditioning we have received from that society, but by being here, we all demonstrate that we are taking responsibility to overcome that conditioning. We will respect our shared effort to learn in good faith.

* (adapted from “Affording Equal Opportunity to Gay and Lesbian Students through Teaching and Counseling” © 1992 NEA)

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