Name: Joanna, Olivia, Kaitlyn, and Katie Lesson Plan: Exploring Important LGBTQ Characters Throughout History Class/Subject:

11th/12th Grade Social Studies Date: 09/26/2013 Student Objectives: Students will gain knowledge about the various roles that LGBTQ people have played throughout history. Students will develop a deeper understanding of important historical figures that were LGBT but were not recognized in the traditional teaching of history. Students will further investigate these characters in order to analyze how their sexual orientation shaped their actions in the past. Our peers will brainstorm and develop ideas about how to teach LGBTQ issues and people in throughout their normal historic narrative. Content Standards: Illinois Standards: IL16.A.5a Analyze historical and contemporary developments using methods of historical inquiry (pose questions, collect and analyze data, make and support inferences with evidence, report findings). IL16.B.5a (US) Describe how modern political positions are affected by differences in ideologies and viewpoints that have developed over time (e.g., political parties positions on government intervention in the economy). IL16.B.5a (W) Analyze worldwide conse- quences of isolated political events, including the events triggering the Napoleonic Wars and World Wars I and II. IL16.B.5c (W) Analyze the relationship of an issue in world political history to the related aspects of world economic, social and environmental history. Materials/ Resources/ Technology: Laptops Notebook and pens/pencils Projector PowerPoint Teachers Goals: We want students to realize that there are important historical characters that were associated with the LGBTQ community that traditional textbooks have neglected to draw attention to. We want to increase student sensitivity to the diverse student body and community they are a part of.

We want students to use their critical thinking skills to analyze the important historic actions of specific characters in relation to their sexual orientation. We want students to use this knowledge to think critically about todays society and how the LGBT community is portrayed and acknowledged in the media, pop culture, and news. We want our peers to think critically and creatively about various important historic events and how they would teach those through an LGBTQ lens.

Time: 60 minutes Start of Class (8 minutes): We will start the class by setting up some groundwork for the decorum and respect we expect from our students throughout the lesson plan. We realize that this may be a topic that could produce controversy or hostility from some students, but we think it is one that is important to teach; we want our students to be knowledgeable of the issues so there may be the hope of eliminating hostility. The article explained how many students feel hostile towards the subject because they are uneducated about the issues; we want to stop that cycle. Therefore, we will begin the class with ground rules and expectations for the remainder of the lesson, and hopefully they will carry those expectations outside the classroom. We will use a prepared PowerPoint with 15 names on the slides. We will ask students if they believe each person was associated with the LGBTQ community in any way. We will ask them to raise their hands with their answer. We will go through all the names on the PowerPoint, tally the total of yes and no for each person and then we will introduce the main part of the lesson. Our goal for this part of the lesson is to hopefully surprise students with important historical figures who were associated with the LGBTQ community and whose sexual orientation were not previously discussed. We want students to be curious and excited to look up more information about these characters. Introduction of Lesson (2 minutes): We will then introduce what our main lesson. We will explain that there have been important historical figures that have been overlooked as being a part of the LGBTQ community in the traditional teaching of history. We want students to investigate these figures further and then answer critical thinking questions about those figures. Lesson Instruction (20 minutes): We will pass out questions to each group to answer about their assigned historical figure. We will also have the questions on the PowerPoint for the benefit of visual learners. Students will be put into groups of 3 to research their assigned figure. We will count off the class by 10s in order to get these groups of 3.

Students will utilize laptops and internet to research their character and answer the questions given to them. They will have about 15 minutes to research and answer the questions. Students will be asked to prepare a brief presentation, which answers their given questions and adds any additional information they found about their character. The questions the students will be asked to answer are: Who was your character? What were their most notable contributions to history/society? How do you think their sexual orientation motivated their actions throughout their lifetime/history? How difficult was it to find information to support whether or not your historical figure was part of the LGBTQ community? Do you think that history textbooks should discuss these figures sexual orientations more openly? Why or why not? Prepare to defend your answer.

Assessment/ Checks for Understanding (10 minutes): The student presentations about their historical figure will be the assessment of the lesson. Students will be asked to tell the class about their figure, the answers to their questions and then any additional information they found interesting about their figure. These presentations will be informative for the other students and everyone will be able to learn about each character and how their contributions in history were shaped by their sexual orientation. In closing the student portion of the lesson, we will ask students to discuss why they think they are just now learning about these historical characters and their LGBTQ connections. We will ask how they feel about not learning about it until now. Why do you think that these issues and characters are not taught in connection with the LGBTQ community? Do you think that you should learn about these figures in this way? Do you think the information about a historical figures sexual orientation should be discussed in regular classrooms and textbooks? This discussion will directly connect to the next portion of our lesson where we discuss how to teach these issues with our peers. This will be a direct segue into the next lesson.

Closure/Wrap-Up/Review: (30 minutes) In this portion of the lesson, we will make connections between the high school lesson we just taught and how we will implement these ideas in our future classrooms. The idea that students are not taught about LGBTQ people in their traditional classrooms will guide us into a discussion about how and when that information should be included. During this portion we will ask our fellow educators to think creatively about how to teach about LGBTQ issues and people to their students. We will focus this portion of the lesson on class discussion as well as a lesson planning activity.

We will directly segue from the discussion about whether students should be taught about these famous figures in connection with the LGBTQ community with follow-up questions about how these issues should be implemented into our history lessons. We will start off by discussing, in connection to the readings, the idea of incorporating LGBTQ issues into the classroom in addition to regularly taught lessons, not as a special day that makes LGBTQ issues seem separate from the rest of the historic narrative being taught. We will ask the class what they believe the best way to implement these ideas into their teachings on a regular basis. What do you believe is the best way to incorporate LGBTQ issues and people into regular lessons without making it a special topic separate from the rest of history? We will then segue into our activity which will have the class analyze already taught historic events with the intention of incorporating LGBTQ issues into those lessons. We will ask the class to brainstorm events that LGBTQ issues and people can be incorporated into. We will write their ideas on the board to be used in their activity. What are some major events that have connections with the LGBTQ community that are not taught currently taught through an LGBTQ lens? Some issues that we came up with are : the Holocaust, KKK, Civil Rights Movement, post-WWII, pop culture (TV, news, celebrities, etc.) The issues that our peers come up with will be used for the lesson planning activity. The class will still be in their small groups from the previous portion of the lesson and will be assigned a specific event that was discussed by the class. With that event in mind, our peers will have to come up with ways that they would incorporate the teaching of LGBTQ issues and people alongside the teaching of that event. We really want to emphasize the importance of including LGBTQ topics in any lesson where it was present. Like the article, we discourage just taking a day or two once a year to teach solely LGBTQ content because that makes it seem like LGBTQ issues are not present throughout the rest of history that is being taught. We want our peers to be creative about how these issues can be incorporated into everyday lessons. They will have 10-15 minutes to brainstorm ideas and come up with a rough lesson/unit plan to present to the rest of the class. We want as many groups to share as possible so that the rest of the class has a chance to hear new ideas that they may potentially use later in their teaching careers. After the presentations, we will go through some prepared discussion questions as a class to wrap up our activity and lesson. These questions should spark some thought and reflection about how we present LGBTQ issues in our classrooms. These questions include: As a teacher, how will you incorporate the concept of knowledge is power into the classroom to discuss LGBTQ issues into specific events throughout history? Examples include, but are not limited to: Holocaust, KKK, Civil Rights, etc. Why is it important to focus on LGBTQ issues on a larger scale in social science classrooms?

As a teacher, how would you facilitate a classroom discussion on LGBTQ issues so that it is done in a mature setting? How do you make sure that your audience is respectful of the discussion topic at hand? How has television transformed over the last two decades in regards to the prevalence of LGBTQ issues/characters? Compare and contrast the differences from 1990s-now. Do you think it is important to discuss current LGBTQ topics in your classroom? Such as the dont ask, dont tell policy, or from a sports aspect as the recent players have started to come out. These questions will wrap up the lesson and our discussion.