Our students deserve a more inclusive classroom curriculum in 2021

As parents and educators help students bring this challenging calendar year to a close, we continue to plan the big 'what's next' in 2021 for the children we care about so deeply. Many facets play into how we support our students' ability to succeed—digital access and mental wellness programs are just a couple of essential efforts thousands of families have benefited from.

But what we fill our virtual classrooms with remains critical to helping students cope with and make sense of the increasingly complex world around them.

As advocates and community members, we must work together to ensure that our students have access to a more inclusive school curriculum that better reflects our shared history and current reality.

The Gen Z tightrope of social justice + online hate speech

After a year of extraordinary social unrest and political divisiveness, members of Gen Z are increasingly engaged in social justice issues just as they are experiencing a 70% increase in online hate speech since the pandemic began. All students deserve a well-balanced curriculum that offers a window into others' lives and a mirror to better understand themselves and their role in our society.

For generations, many students have struggled to see themselves reflected in curriculum focused primarily from the white, middle class, heterosexual perspective—their own race, their gender and/or their sexual orientation have felt absent or, at best, a mere footnote in classroom curriculum. This lack of visibility does little to promote the self-awareness, empathy and unity we should be encouraging our isolated students to experience and engage in.

Our classroom materials and conversations should reflect the students they are designed to engage with. In our diverse Houston Independent School District, with a student body made up of 62.52% Hispanic/Latino students and 22.74% Black/African American students, we can and should do a better job ensuring our shared history is told from more diverse perspectives.

In the wake of the TSBOE's November 20 decision against including sexual orientation and gender identity in health education courses, the estimated 11.2% of HISD 9th - 12th graders who identify as LGBTQ+ and their peers stand to gain from an updated and more inclusive curriculum too.

I mean, it’s not ALL bad, right? Right???

Some important and hard-won steps have been taken to offer opportunities for more inclusive learning opportunities within our state, including the Texas State Board of Education's 2020 approval of an African American Studies course and the 2016 approval of a Hispanic studies course for Texas public schools. But these courses have not been adopted by HISD yet, nor should they be the only strides made in embedding a more holistic, diverse educational approach across all subjects and grade levels.

How do over-taxed teachers and parents face this challenge?

• Start by speaking to your school's leadership about what exists and what might be with your support, then reach out to the HISD Curriculum and Development Department and encourage other concerned families and community members to do the same.

• Another critical strategy lies in the online classroom experience itself. As educators rely on more digital resources to support their students, so too can they move away from sometimes-problematic traditional textbooks in favor of more regularly updated materials from a more diverse authorship.

• There are many thousands of free open source educational resources like digital textbooks, worksheets and other free learning tools (including the Houston-based OpenStax organization) that teachers and parents alike can benefit from in enriching classroom curriculum and conversations.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, our students deserve the opportunity to view the world through a more complete lens.

Taking active steps to ensure we provide them with a more holistic curriculum means enriching our future with the ability to understand where we are today and to see glimpses of themselves and the promise students hold for the future.