Helping my students to think critically about social justice
issues—the environment, poverty, race, prejudice and
discrimination—has been a challenge for me as a teacher educator
on an urban campus. I have aimed to get ELA pre-service
teachers, a wonderfully diverse group, to question social
inequalities they see rather than accept things the way they
are. However, when it comes to gender, I have had to take a
lesson from my students. Last year I taught a course for the
first time that was quite a change for me. It was not a teacher
education course but had legacy as its theme: Celebrating Life
and Leaving a Legacy. I planned to include a writing assignment
about construction of gender identity but did not stop to
consider LGBT youth in the class whose lives were shrouded in
silence and might remain that way if no opportunity were
provided to begin a conversation about gender and socially
constructed identities. I was caught up in developing library
resources and curriculum for freshmen and ways to think crit