By Katherine Conner
Faculty mentors: Dr. Melissa Wells, Dr. Miriam Liss, Professor Kate Haffey
10:00-10:50am, HCC 327
LGBTQ+ students experience bullying, depression, anxiety, and suicidality at higher rates than their non-LGBTQ+ peers (GLSEN & Harrison Interactive, 2012). One reason this may occur is because many teachers are not equipped to discuss diverse sexual identities, inadvertently othering LGBTQ+ identities (Hartman, 2018 and Hermann-Wilmarth & Ryan, 2015). Multicultural children’s literature expert Bishop’s (1990) theories about literature could suggest that LGBTQ+ children’s literature could provide LGBTQ+ students a mirror to reflect their own identities and offer non-LGBTQ+ windows of empathy into LGBTQ+ lives. I created the LGBTQ+ Children’s Literature Evaluation Measure for elementary school teachers to evaluate and select LGBTQ+ children’s literature. I then evaluated the efficacy of this measure by recruiting pre-service teachers to read and evaluate LGBTQ+ children’s books using the measure. Afterwards, they took a survey on their experience. Through this, I tested the impact of the measure on pre-service teachers’ confidence in evaluating and selecting LGBTQ+ children’s literature.
