The words we teach our children shape the world. This roundtable will demonstrate how historians in colleges and universities can translate their expertise in LGBT history for practical use by K-12 teachers. The session will feature the perspectives of educators with experience in relevant partnerships and will include practical curricular guides, models, road maps, and case studies. Participants include faculty, former teachers, graduate students, social science history project staff, and the lead author of the report, “Making the Framework FAIR,” which elaborated ways to align diverse LGBT history content with California’s social science curriculum framework.

They will share some of their challenges, successes, and thoughts on working with K-12 educators, as well as specific strategic examples in which historians and teachers have worked together to navigate teaching LGBT history in the K-12 classroom. They will address the challenges of teaching LGBT material in states, like California, where there is now an inclusive curricular framework, states that are considered “friendly” to such material even without a dedicated curriculum, and states where the educational environment is considerably less hospitable—or even hostile—to LGBT content. The goal is mobilizing the resources and capacities of faculty in the service of widespread and high quality LGBT history education.