Harvard Educational Review A leader in educational scholarship for over 70 years

Toward a Most Thorough Understanding of the World: Sexual Orientation and Early Childhood
Education

VIRGINIA CASPER

HARRIET K. CUFFARO

STEVEN SCHULTZ

JONATHAN G. SILIN

ELAINE WICKENS

Bank Street College of Education, New York City

Abstract

Written collaboratively by five educators from the Bank Street College of Education, this article focuses on sexual orientation and early childhood education, an issue that is often overlooked. The authors describe research projects they have undertaken to explore elementary school teachers' thoughts and attitudes about sexual orientation in relation to children's sexuality and parents' sexual orientation. Building from there, they examine the connections between teachers' reflections of their own childhood experience and their current attitudes towards sexual orientation. They then move from exploring adult conceptions of family to examining those of children. Finally, the authors describe the process of transformation at Bank Street College as the institution struggles to include gay and lesbian lives in the early childhood and graduate school curriculum. Throughout the article, the authors continually connect their proactive stance for inclusion around sexual orientation with their larger vision of a more just and equitable society.
(pp. 271-293)

In 1989, an informal hallway conversation just outside the cafeteria at Bank Street College led to the formation of a lesbian and gay research group. It was not total happenstance that brought three of us (Virginia Casper, Steve Schultz, and Elaine Wickens) together in the hallway that day. Nor is it happenstance that two other faculty members (Harriet Cuffaro and Jonathan Silin) joined our group in 1994. Although there are many differences among us - we are women and men, straight and gay, parents and teachers, from working-class and middle-class families, from urban and rural environments - we have all chosen to work in a unique institution with a particular history and specific location in the educational landscape. Founded as the Bureau of Educational Experiments in 1916 by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Bank Street College is part of the progressive tradition that sees schools as both a route to social change and a context in which to study the development of children (Antler, 1987; Biber, 1984; Shapiro & Nager, 1995). It remains a small, informal, and non-hierarchical community by contemporary standards.

Perhaps we found ourselves working collaboratively at Bank Street because it is a place where hallway conversations such as ours are frequently intense and impassioned, where the tension between what is and what might be is not forgotten, and where stories about children and questions from graduate students are placed in a political context. While it is now possible for faculty at Bank Street to be out as lesbian or gay in their classrooms, to advocate for curriculum about lesbian and gay families, and to participate openly in gay politics, this has not always been the case, nor is it true for everyone in every facet of the institution.

Brought together because of our belief that schools can help to create a more just society through fostering democratic processes and principles, we five also came together as friends and colleagues, some of us with shared histories going back to the 1960s. Although we had a common educational vocabulary, talking about sexual orientation presented new challenges. For example, one straight member of the group was uncomfortable with words such as "dyke" that occurred easily in the talk of gay members. She did not even want to refer to the sexual orientation of lesbian and gay people because she felt that this might have a negative connotation for them, as if they would read it as an accusation. Gay members of the group pointed out that they see such labeling as defining their identity and as a source of pride. In turn, when we have discussed the interviews we have done with teachers, there have been moments when gay members of the group heard only homophobia in the responses of participants, whereas straight members identified different complexities of thinking and the possibility for dialogue contained therein.

The word "collaboration" comes from the Latin collaborare, to labor together. As contemporary educators, we are well versed in the literature on collaborative research and cooperative learning. We have also read the postmodern theorists on the significance of difference, the end of grand narratives, and the disappearance of the coherent subject. They remind us that no one is objective, and that an attempt to create a seamless narrative would belie the counterpoint of our ongoing conversations. However, when faced with the hard task of writing an engaging essay that reflects many voices, these postmodern reminders do not seem especially helpful. While we enjoy a common interest in qualitative methodologies - in-depth interviews, classroom ethnography, and textual analysis - each of us brings a unique perspective. By alternating between the first-person singular and first-person plural, we have sought to honor our differences and to recognize the mutual influence and shared understandings that have emerged over the last six years. Our knowledge of lesbian and gay issues in schools is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, which is a distinct outcome of our laboring together.

Within a month of coming together, the initial members of our group wrote a position paper identifying the need for research on improving communication between lesbian/gay parents and the schools. During the following year we conducted our first interviews with parents, teachers, and administrators as we sought to clarify how each group saw the others. This article briefly summarizes our research since that time and describes the changes in the visibility and salience of lesbian/gay issues that occurred throughout the college community as a result of our work (Casper, Schultz, & Wickens, 1992; Casper & Schultz, 1995; Wickens, 1993, 1994; Wickens & Schultz, 1994).

Our work brings together several new pieces of research that we have conducted in public and private schools in inner-city and rural settings among people from diverse ethnic, racial, religious, and class backgrounds. In the first section, Elaine Wickens describes how our research has grown out of concerns raised by our graduate students; in the second, Steven Schultz explores the ways that adult attitudes about sexual orientation are shaped by their early experience. In the third section, Virginia Casper makes us reconsider the role of experience in children's conception of family, and in the fourth, Harriet Cuffaro returns to the adult perspective, now in terms of the issue of institutional change and the cumulative impact of our research on teacher education at Bank Street College. Jonathan Silin, who has coordinated the writing of this piece, concludes by highlighting our shared commitment to creating a more equitable society.

Parents' Questions and Teachers' Responses

Two projects of the lesbian and gay research group grew out of questions asked by graduate students. Since findings from the first project on lesbian and gay parents have been presented elsewhere (Casper et al., 1992; Wickens, 1993), in this section I (Elaine Wickens) focus on the second project, an exploration of how teachers might respond to parental concerns about the perceived sexual orientation of a six-year-old boy. While some of the teachers we interviewed saw homosexuality as "not normal," we also found that participants were ready to talk about the issue and that they recognized the need to work effectively with gay/lesbian parents and children.

When some of my colleagues first learned that I had become involved in anti-bias research centering on gay and lesbian issues, inevitably they asked me how and why I had begun this work. Simply put, I was in the right place at the right time to act. And for those who wanted to know more, to listen to where my memory took me, to share past times, there was this to tell.

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia in the 1930s, prior to desegregation. Political activism and concerns about social equity were a part of my childhood. My father supported the miners when they struck, and my older brother was an organizer for Henry Wallace during the 1948 Presidential campaign. I remember sitting on top of the mountain we called the Devil's Teatable, which overlooks the Kanawaha River. I used to look down on the polluted river and wish it could be cleaned up so that everyone would swim in it and the world would be sweet. That river seemed the only place that was free in a world of segregated pools, schools, movie houses, and restaurants. I can also remember that sometime before I was in first grade, there was a man in our neighborhood who did odd jobs and delivered ice. People made fun of him, called him "sweet lips." In retrospect, I wonder if the jokesters were laughing at him because they thought he was gay, but they aren't around to ask. In high school, I took part in a walkout when the principal of our school told dialect jokes in the assembly. I did not plan to be part of the walkout, but I was there and chose to act.

I chose to act too when the president of Bank Street College called for a faculty group to plan a residence and day-care center for homeless families. The project was to be a collaboration between the College and the Salvation Army, an agency that had a policy barring the employment of lesbian and gay teachers. Bank Street's own hiring policy explicitly prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. Working with the Salvation Army, I argued, would clearly compromise our principles and policies. After much discussion, the College decided not to pursue this project.

One day in the midst of the heated college-wide debate about the Salvation Army, Penny, a former student who is now working as an elementary school teacher, stood in my office doorway. She asked, "What do you know about having two moms as parents in a classroom? My principal told me to get ready for a five-year-old boy with two moms who would be in my classroom in the fall." I told Penny that I had never thought about this situation before and would see what I could find out.

I met with Steve Schultz later that day to talk about Penny's question. I told him I was surprised that I had never thought about gay- and lesbian-headed families entering the school culture. After further conversations with Virginia Casper, the three of us decided to explore Penny's question in a more systematic manner by interviewing gay/lesbian parents, early childhood teachers, and administrators (Casper et al., 1992; Wickens, 1993). Our goal was to learn what lesbian and gay parents wanted the school to know about their families, and what they in turn wanted to know about the school. With the gay and lesbian parents' permission, we also interviewed their children's teachers and school administrators to find out what school personnel wanted to know about gay- and lesbian-headed families and what they felt the families should know about the school.

Through these interviews, we learned to place the issue of gay and lesbian parents within the context of an inclusive, broadly defined multicultural education. Since young children's curriculum frequently focuses on the meaning of family, the inclusion of gay- and lesbian-headed families has special salience to the early childhood classroom. Most parents must make difficult decisions about the disclosure of personal information when their children first enter school, and these concerns are heightened for gay and lesbian parents. Our interviews provided important insights into the ways that specific educational settings invite or discourage disclosure of sexual orientation. They also revealed confusions amongst gender identity, gender role, and sexual orientation. Many school personnel shared questions: Would children growing up with two parents of the same sex have access to what they considered to be "appropriate gender role models"? Do girls need to have a male parent in order to recognize their own femininity? Do boys need a father in order to exhibit masculine behaviors? Do boys need a mother in order to recognize their own masculinity? Confusion about gender and sexual orientation led teachers to wonder whether children raised in gay or lesbian families would grow up to be gay or lesbian themselves. In general, most lesbian and gay parents did not have these concerns. They simply wanted both male and female adult - relatives, friends, and teachers - in their children's lives who represented diverse cultures, careers, and sexual orientations.

Two years after Penny appeared at my office door, another graduate student, Josephine, raised an even more provocative question. She was standing in the school yard early one morning when a mother of a six-year-old in her class approached her with a discomforting remark. She said, "I, we, think our son is gay. He dresses in my clothes all the time." Taken aback, Josephine responded, "He does play with girls a lot."

Josephine brought this incident to her conference group, which was composed of five other graduate students and myself, her advisor. Conference group is a place where students regularly bring events from their practice teaching for discussion and peer feedback. At the time, I naively assumed that Josephine was motivated by a desire to give a more complete response to these concerned parents, one that was accepting of the possibility that their child might be gay. This assumption framed my work with the group that day. It was two years later that Josephine told me she had only recently become more comfortable talking about lesbian and gay issues, and that at the time of her participation in the conference group she had actually disapproved of lesbian and gay lives. In this situation, I think that my own enthusiasm and research commitment had blinded me to the reality of Josephine's attitude. She had taught me an important lesson.

Just as Penny's question helped to initiate our research, Josephine's concern served to enlarge our perspective. Now we realized that teachers not only had to get ready to talk about gay- and lesbian-headed families, but also to address questions about children's sexual orientation. In order to learn how other teachers would respond in Josephine's situation, we interviewed thirteen informants. During 1993, my own life circumstances allowed me to conduct interviews in the rural southwest, as well as in New York City. I chose experienced teachers from diverse backgrounds - Anglos, Latinos, Native Americans - who had worked in either public or private early childhood (K-2) settings. The children in these settings reflected diverse racial, religious, and socioeconomic histories. I began each interview by describing the situation in which Josephine had found herself that morning in the school yard and asked the teachers how they would have responded to the mother's comment. I also asked whether they had found themselves in similar situations and, if so, what they had done. These simple questions led to interviews that lasted from thirty minutes to an hour. The interviews were tape recorded and transcribed. All members of the research group reviewed the transcripts and discussed their responses together.

We learned that several of the teachers had already been queried by parents of children as young as three and four years of age about their child's sexual orientation. When asked what they would say to parents of a six-year-old, half of them gave replies such as, "I guess I would say it's normal for children to experiment with different roles. I would try to put it in a range of normal behavior for that age."

Several of the teachers had never thought about the question, and one could not even imagine herself in Josephine's place. The interview itself caused other teachers to explore the issue of sexual orientation for the first time, and we were able to observe their thinking as it evolved. For example, at the beginning of one interview, a teacher who taught second grade in a public school announced that while she believed all children capable of learning, she also thought a child who might be gay belonged in a special education class. But at the end of the interview, just as I was leaving, she called after me, "Let me know what you find out. I might have to get ready for this." The teacher's initial assumption that anyone can learn expresses her hopefulness about all children, while her designation of a special education classroom indicates her view that being gay is a problem requiring expert management. As a teacher educator, my own hopefulness is buoyed by the teacher's final comment, an acknowledgment that she may need to learn more about sexual orientation and young children.

Our informants asked many questions themselves. What was really known about the origins of sexual orientation? At what age could a young child be said to be gay? The majority of teachers tended to agree with the teacher who said:

The notion that a child is doing or being anything just doesn't make sense. . . . There's no way of knowing that a six- or seven- or eight-[year-old child is gay]. I just don't think that anybody could possibly know that.

Teachers frequently wanted additional information from parents who felt their child might be gay. They wanted to place the specific behaviors parents described into a larger context; for example, what else was going on at home? This effort to contextualize behavior, to avoid judgments based on a single incident of any kind, is common practice in early childhood education. It is a strategy teachers often employ when confronted by overwrought parents who are overly anxious about a child's behavior. Teachers, in turn, are practiced at giving multiple concrete examples of behaviors that concern them.

Teachers often wanted time to reflect on the situation being presented by parents and to search for unarticulated questions lying beneath the surface. What were parental attitudes toward homosexuality and the possibility that a child might be lesbian or gay? What did they do or say when they found their child dressing up in the clothing of the other gender? One teacher explained her response this way:

I would ask the parent to say more about why this is a concern for them. I would try to help them with a lot of support to address these concerns. I would want to see if there is homophobia on the part of the parent. I suppose you could be truly concerned about your child and not be homophobic. . . . If the child has been dressing up in both parents' clothes all along or just playing dress-up in his or her own room, then I would try to help the parent see this as part of a continuing and very normal part of childhood.

Words such as "normal" are a reflection of many professionals' traditional reliance on the literature of child development, and this normative language is embedded in many accepted standards of practice (Bredekamp, 1987). In recent years, however, this reliance has come increasingly into question, along with its implicit beliefs in normal development (Kessler & Swadener, 1992; Silin, 1995).

When we began our research, we wondered if other educators would be interested in our work. When we presented our project at the 1993 conference of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, two hundred people attended the session. Queried as to whether they had been asked about a child's sexual orientation, half of the attendees raised their hands. We were especially impressed by how one teacher responded to a mother's concern that her son might be gay because he liked to wear jewelry. Her words capture the direct and unbiased manner that we feel best addresses the question of sexual orientation:

First we talked about seven-year-olds and their general interest in dressing up, fantasy play, and fidgeting with little plastic junk like toys, rings, hair barrettes, etc. I told her Ben was right on target in that area. Then I mentioned that wearing jewelry didn't mean that he was gay, but that one in ten people is gay, so it was likely that three children in our class are gay! She was a bit shocked. But if Ben is gay, she should start enjoying that fact ASAP!

Gay and Lesbian Parents in the Classroom

In this section, I (Steven Schultz) examine some of my own experiences and those of the educators in our first study (Casper et al., 1992), in order to understand the ways individuals come to accept lesbian and gay parents in their schools.

One educator we interviewed, Ms. Frankel, a public school principal, made certain connections between her early experiences and her present-day attitudes:

I think one has to work backwards from one's current philosophy, which isn't only an educational one but a political one. It seems to me that all my adult life I've been involved in areas where that is exactly what we were trying to do, be inclusive. I think the civil rights movement had a very big impact on me - its successes and its failures. I think probably my childhood, which included very strong feelings about unions, and also a pair of aunts who were Communists in the thirties, and who were closer to my age than to my mother's age, and whom I spent a great deal of time with, they taught me a lot about people being different, that that's the way life was, and that everybody deserved a break.¹

For me, how I received the world and what I expressed in it was changed by my son the moment I became a parent, then changed again after I became ill, and again when my companion died from AIDS. All of these people and events affected me deeply. They turned the kaleidoscope through which I received the world, and they altered the range, pitch, or tone of my voice as they suggested new vocabulary to describe my new experiences. A slice of the world not previously noticed can suddenly become visible. Mr. D'Angelo, a public school principal, describes how the work of his brother served as a catalyst for Mr. D'Angelo's own greater awareness, which may in turn have created a shift in his thinking about sexual orientation and gay people in general:

I don't even remember thinking about [gay people], to be quite honest with you. No, I don't think I ever really thought about it. . . . I have a brother who's a lawyer, who at one point was representing gay people. He had a very strong point of view with respect to their needs being incorporated into all aspects of our society and had a strong opinion about what was going on.

Philip Jackson, in his book Untaught Lessons (1992), writes that our early experiences and subsequent memories may affect our present-day selves in ways that often seem mysterious. The mystery comes in the difficulty and sometimes impossibility of putting our finger on the particular event or interaction behind our actions, thinking, and understandings. Jackson, for instance, affectionately remembers that his high school math teacher, Mrs. Henzi, had a definite and powerful influence on him, but he cannot identify why or how. Given the deep roots that influence how we see and interpret our experiences and, at the same time, the always-present possibility of change, we wanted to explore the stories teachers shared with us about how their attitudes towards lesbian and gay people were shaped: What did they recall? What connections did they make? Some of the educators who learned that they had children with lesbian, gay, or bisexual parents were also dealing with the issue of sexual orientation for the first time in their own lives, and were struggling to fit it into their current worldview.

Father Stephen, a school administrator, combines life experiences with his interpretations of church teachings. He asserts that he would be "against bias of any kind . . . on the basis of gender, religion, sex, or whatever," but his strong convictions and life experiences lead him to view homosexuality - and particularly lesbian and gay parents - as dangerous:

What I view as an effort - and a continuing and increasingly strong effort - to have homosexuality accepted popularly as an equally viable lifestyle, I would not want to be part of such an effort. I think that so much of the problems of our time is the breakup and deterioration of the average, normal family. . . . I had an uncle who was rather severely retarded. But he became a carpenter, a sanitation worker. But he was able to survive because of being embedded in this family context, and he did not wind up on the street. He did not wind up in an institution, but he was able to be supported. And I think a great deal of the problems today with homelessness stem from that deterioration of the family structure. And, I think that some of the advocates of homosexual equality with heterosexual equality would encourage a kind of diminution of the value of the heterosexual family.

This varied use of experience is illustrated by the ways that Fred, a kindergarten teacher, and Sol, a first-grade teacher, interpreted somewhat similar experiences. Fred related his experiences of growing up without a father to the life of Dan, a child in his class who has lesbian parents:

My father died when I was fifteen. You go through everything then. . . . It's only been in the last five years that I can sort it out, that it's become clear. That reflection, I think, comes with time. The same thing with the situation with Dan. [Dan's parents] can set up as much as he can handle, but there are some things that you're just not going to be able to foresee. With the father gone, the fact that he doesn't see his father anymore, it's a big break. I went through that. It causes a lot of pain, and you have to deal with it, because it's not going to change. But the more I think about it, the more I think there's some[thing] unconscious that may play a part at some time, as in a need or something that's not even voiced. He is a bright boy, but he knows he's different.

Where I'm coming from is that my father died when I was nine and a lot of the adult men really moved in to fill the gap. I appreciated it and even then I understood that my mother was alone and a lot of people were supporting us and it was important. [But] without being able to verbalize it, I understood from that age that this was really offensive. The assumption wasn't that I had lost a specific human being who could not be replaced, but that I had lost the man that has to be in a boy's life and I was offended by the whole idea of big brothers. So whether I was gay or straight I would have this perspective that it is absurd to say you need a male or a female role model. You need at least one caring adult caretaker, period.

Through examining some of the stated attitudes and stories of educators regarding lesbian and gay people, this section has attempted to show the effect of early events and interactions on individual attitudes and how they are frequently drawn upon to explain new twists and turns encountered in one's world. Yet, a note of caution is required here. Simply because points of view can draw from deeply personal events in one's life does not make all perspectives equally justifiable or true. And, in fact, it is this deeply personal element that can most powerfully warp our own ideas and attitudes. Without stepping back and looking at any charged issue with a more disciplined eye, the closeness of personal memories can have the potential to cloud our vision. It is with honest reflection on these raw materials of our own biography - a kind of checking in with the outside world like that encouraged in the discussions of the children in the following section - that we can best clarify and direct our own practice.

The Role of Experience in Children's Conception of Family

Louis told Jake he couldn't have two mothers, that you need a dad to have a baby. Jake answered immediately, "I have two mothers. My mom went to a doctor and got some seed and that's how I got started."

Messages appeared regularly on our voice mail, and little scraps of paper with intriguing anecdotes began to pile up in our mail boxes. Inadvertently, our research served as an invitation to others to think about these issues with us, which helped us refocus our work with children.

The image of young children sharing and playing out their evolving concepts of family during the course of a school day is a familiar one to early childhood educators. As family forms are becoming more varied and more visible, children who have been raised by gay and lesbian parents join with other children to enlarge the already diverse family constellations talked about by children in classrooms. My growing awareness of what children know about families was shaped by my ongoing observations of young children as a teacher educator. As a parent I was acculturated to the assumptions children have about each other's families, but as a lesbian mother I was particularly attuned to the subtle comparisons that children make. I recall a walk home from school as a group of first and second graders analyzed the different meanings of "father," "daddy," and "papi." I knew such conversations were not rare and that children's direct and indirect experiences with a broad range of family forms were affecting their thinking about what constitutes a family.

Trained as a developmental psychologist, I became curious about what the literature had to say about children's conceptions of the family. Twenty-five years of research claims that children's experiences with family have a minimal impact on how they define a family and which groupings of people they determine to be examples of a family (Newman, Roberts, & Syre, 1993; Pederson & Gilby, 1986). The gold standard in this research is Piaget's (1928/1965) original study of a child's increasing ability to reason about kin and family relations. Piaget's premise was that without more mature cognitive structures, a young child's experience of being a brother, for example, did not bring that child closer to understanding the inherent reciprocity of that relationship. Using traditional methodology of standardized individual child assessments, the research following Piaget shows that neither family-related curricula (Watson & Amgott-Kwan, 1984) nor the very direct experience of living in a particular family form appears to have any effect on children's definition of a family or their validation of those situations as family (Brodzinsky, Schechter, & Brodinsky, 1986; Newman et al., 1993; Pederson & Gilby, 1986; Powell, Wilcher, Wedemeyer, & Claypool, 1981.) Investigators of children's family concepts have failed to incorporate post-Piagetian research on the ability of young children to decenter, take the perspective of another, and utilize non-egocentric thinking (Borke, 1975; Hart & Goldin-Meadow, 1984; Shatz & Gelman, 1973). These abilities appear to surface more when children are presented with tasks that make "human sense" (Donaldson, 1978). And with notable exceptions (Newman et al., 1993; Bernstein, 1988), efforts to integrate children's affective expressions about family with their cognitive understandings have been minimal. Finally, while increased family diversity is almost always cited as a rationale for such work, only a handful of studies actually include diverse samples. It is these few studies alone, however, that suggest that experience does play a role. The experience of living in a divorced family, for example, makes children more likely to accept a single-parent family as an example of family (Camera, 1979; Moore, Bickhard, & Cooper, 1977; Wedemeyer, Bickard, & Cooper, 1989). While there have been studies that look at the effects of being raised by gay parents (Patterson, 1992), studies that look at the role of experience in children's conceptions of family do not include children from lesbian and gay families.

I was stunned by these data and perceived them to be counter-intuitive. As a teacher educator I found them at odds with my own observations of young children in group settings. As the idea of doing more structured observations began to gel, Steven Schultz and I looked to theory in order to ground our study. Given our commitment to ethnographic methodologies, we sought to generate or extend theory rather than test it (Casper, 1996.) As we began to conceptualize a study, we utilized both Vygotsky (1934/1962) and Piaget (1928/1965). Piaget separated young children's early-absorption and direct use of adult language from their later, more conscious understanding of a concept based on their developing cognitive structures and direct experience. Thus, he believed that a young child's definition of family comes less from actual experience and more from direct adult transmission. Vygotsky never studied children's thinking about family to the same extent as Piaget. Nevertheless, his juxtaposition of spontaneous (everyday) and formal (scientific) concepts became a pivotal point for our thinking. Vygotsky emphasizes the interactive connection between what we know (spontaneous/everyday) but cannot yet express, and concepts we have learned (formal/scientific) but for which we do not yet have significant experience to bring richness of meaning.

In order to explore how children think about families as part of our ongoing collaborative exploration, a research team was established during the 1992-1993 academic year, consisting of two graduate faculty members (myself and Steven Schultz) and two classroom teachers from an urban, private, progressive school for children ages three to thirteen. A mini-grant allowed us to pilot an ethnographically based study. We decided to begin by observing and videotaping in five classrooms, including children from a first grade, two second grades, one fourth and one eighth grade.

In this school, daily classroom meetings that often open with questions to prompt a discussion are an ongoing part of the curriculum. As we began to listen to family-related discussions across this broad age span, the differences in issues between the younger versus the older children, combined with our own limited resources, directed us to focus on the younger children.

Rather than representing a group of people in the global sense, ethnographic work is known for its ability to represent what Robin Leavitt (1994) calls "a dramatic instance." In this vein, it is important to acknowledge some of the unique aspects of this school community. Children in the classes had known each other and their families for at least a few years, and some since the age of two. In each class we visited, many family structures were represented, and some children appeared to know of gay- and lesbian-headed families even if they were not actually represented in the group. Each class already included family study as a part of its naturally evolving curriculum. Teachers informed us when particular discussions would take place, and we also planned some sessions jointly in our collaborative meetings. While perhaps not "typical," we view this environment as rich in family-related experiences. Following are brief excerpts of discussions in three of the classrooms.

The Continent of Love

Michael, a K-1 classroom teacher, overheard some children in his class wonder aloud about marriage. A few children wanted to know if boys could marry boys, or girls could marry girls. The children arrived one morning to see that Michael had put these questions on the chart for discussion: Can a man marry a man? Can a woman marry a woman?

Early in the conversation, one child introduced the idea of love between members of the same sex, saying, "My cousin has two moms. They got divorced from their husbands. They started to love each other and asked each other, `Do you want to live together?' They said yes." This child's comment reflects both her direct experience of her aunts and a repetition of a relative's account of their family story. This cogent statement was ignored and the rest of the children went on to discuss what is allowed and what is not. The children said such things as:

Sam: In some countries a man and a man, and a woman and a woman marry. But they can't here. It would be breaking the law. . . . My mom told me.

Emily: A law is like a big rule. . .

Tanya: This is not a country. It's a city.

Sam: Different parts of the world are called countries.

Rachel: This isn't one of them.

Mid-way through the conversation, Michael helped the children clarify concepts with two questions: What's the difference between living together and getting married? What's getting married?

The discussion jumped between the requisite objects and place for marriage and what constitutes love:

Sam: You don't have to like . . . you have to love to get married. Loving means more than liking.

Emily: You have to wear fancy clothes. There's something called a wedding dress.

Tanya: I know another name for a country. It's a continent.

Gloria: I don't think the United States is a continent. A continent is something up in space.

Adam: You can have two dads or two moms.

Michael: How do you know?

Adam: I forgot the word.

Michael: Just describe it.

Adam: I can't.

Jason: A step-dad?

Adam: No.

Sandra: I know what a boy and a boy is when they get married . . . (She speaks loudly and distinctly) Gay.

Michael (to Adam): Is that what you're talking about?

Adam (nodding): Yes.

Michael: Uh huh.

Fitting Families to the City or the City to Families?  Six- and Seven-Year-Olds Make Crate Cities

In two first/second-grade classrooms, the students conducted a year-long study of the city, which culminated in building a "crate city." Constructed from discarded wine crates and figures, made to scale of wood and cardboard, the city included private houses, apartment buildings, libraries, schools, shops, etc. Children worked as a group to decide who would live in the city, what relationships the residents would have, how the buildings would look, and what kinds of jobs would be necessary to make the city function well. Along with this work, the children spent a good part of the year discussing the nature of family.

In mid-spring, one of the teachers, Judy, expressed her surprise and dismay to us at the conventional nature of the families her children had made up and placed within the city. The children's actual families represented great diversity; moreover, as a group, they had had rich discussions about family all year. When she shared her puzzlement with the children, they defended their choice of traditional nuclear families saying, "It's the usual," "There was no room [for other kinds of families]," "[Other kinds of families] wouldn't fit." In order to shift the tone and quality of the conversation, Judy asked the children to think about a boy in the other first/second grade who had two mothers. Many of the children had visited this child's home, seen his mothers at school, or met the entire family in the neighborhood. In asking them to consider their experience of his family, Judy brought to consciousness knowledge they already possessed.

The other first/second grade was a bit behind in the construction of its city. On hearing of Judy's experience, Beth, the teacher, decided to have a discussion to revisit their previous talks about different kinds of families before the children actually constructed their families. In this meeting, she asked, "Who is in your family?" Quite a few children named those in their immediate and extended family; others joined in with their feelings about family, including how they felt when grown-ups argue. Eventually, a child with two lesbian mothers described his family as "two moms and a dad," continuing, "My two moms live with me and my dad lives in Philadelphia and it's confusing." A discussion ensued in which other children tried to postulate what might be confusing about "having three parents." Not much was established beyond this point, although questions and comments were aired with the same open tone as the rest of the meeting.

When both classes finished their cities, one could see that these discussions did more than just remind the children that they all come from a wide variety of family structures. In the process of drawing and constructing people for their families in the crate city, the children experimented, commented, asked questions, and sometimes changed their family planning. In Beth's class, the children clearly profited from their additional discussion of family prior to actually creating the families for their city. Three girls initially expressed their desire to make a family with two mothers and a female child. Another family also included two fathers. When the families were actually created and the city was finished, there was one family with two mothers (not created by the child with lesbian mothers) and numerous other constellations that broadly represented the family diversity of the children in the class. And, by a unanimous vote, it was decreed: No baby-sitters allowed in this crate city!

These conversations are but moments in the long year that a class of children spend together. Yet in these moments, issues are raised about what children know of contemporary families, the persistence of stereotypes that contradict lived experience, the impact of these stereotypes on children living in diverse family structures, and the deep connections between cognition and affect.

The teachers in each of these classrooms took the lead in making lesbian and gay families salient, a natural part of the spectrum of possibilities. Evocative questions helped children reach into their own experiences and pull out what they already knew and what remained problematic. In this way, teachers helped children find and name their everyday experiences of family. Thus, each learning environment was transformed into a place where assumptions about what constitutes family were unhinged, creating a different standard than the one from which children usually take their cues. In turn, this allowed the children to venture forth with their thoughts, questions, fantasies, and feelings about family. In the next section we explore the importance of teachers, at all levels, creating classroom environments where such conversations can happen.

Extending Invitations: The Process of Institutional Change

In this section, I (Harriet Cuffaro) will highlight some of the qualitative changes that have occurred in the social atmosphere of Bank Street College in relation to more open discussions about sexual orientation. It is an account of our institutional experiences - of small and large events, of individual and group activity, of interactions and transactions, of transformations, and of events and people outside the institution that also served as catalysts for change.

As educators, we know that every classroom has a quality that can be felt by the people who enter it. That quality is partly determined by the materials provided and the way space is arranged. Equally important is the social atmosphere - something that is sensed and that determines the nature of the relationship between and among people. It also determines whether the telling of personal stories is invited or inhibited. The same can be said of institutions.

When I joined the Bank Street faculty over twenty years ago, there were gay and lesbian people throughout the institution, but theirs was an invisible, unspoken presence, known but unacknowledged. For all of our progressivism on many issues, in this area we as a community were politely mute. The social atmosphere invited silence.

The first "breaks" in the institutional silence occurred in the early 1980s in the School for Children, with the appearance of lesbian families who were open and articulate about their relationships. The impact of their presence on the institution, however, remained localized in the Children's School. In 1987, the presence of another lesbian family in the College's Family Center for infants and toddlers did not remain local to that community. At the first parent meeting of the school year, the director of the Center welcomed all families and named the variety of families, among them gay and lesbian families. This public statement of inclusion was reinforced as pictures of each child's family were placed on the walls, and the children talked about and questioned the meaning of family. Student teachers working in the Family Center also talked and questioned, expanding the conversations about gay and lesbian families into the Graduate School. Though most often restricted to events in various parts of the institution, a qualitative shift was occurring within the whole. The words "gay" and "lesbian" now were spoken aloud, but still with some quality of distance, of tentative inclusion.

Further changes slowly began to occur within the institution at large. For example, the discussions surrounding a possible contract with the Salvation Army described in an earlier section of this article contributed to heightened awareness of gay and lesbian issues. In the Graduate School, certain events continued to bring gay and lesbian issues to the forefront. In January 1989, during intercession, the Graduate School held a series of meetings with a multicultural theme for students and faculty. At the suggestion of a lesbian faculty member, one of the organizations invited to attend was the Gay and Lesbian Teachers of New York City. Few people chose this session - only two students, myself, and two other faculty members. In the discussion that took place, one of the students underlined the invisibility I have described when she said, "We're not here. Even in the child development courses nothing is said." In exasperation she blurted, "We're not even mentioned in terms of abnormal psychology!" At our next teacher education faculty meeting, I presented the student's comments and feelings. There were surprised and mixed reactions among some faculty, but the discussion did lead to including sexual orientation as part of development in some of the Child Development courses.

It was after the publication of the 1992 Teachers College Record article, "Breaking the Silences: Lesbian and Gay Parents and the Schools" by Virginia, Steve, and Elaine, members of our research group, that another teacher education faculty meeting turned into an extraordinary event. While congratulating our colleagues and expressing pride in their pioneering work, veils slowly began to drop and silences were truly broken. One staff member spoke of learning that her daughter was a lesbian and asked for help in understanding this new knowledge. Another staff member "came out" at the meeting. While everyone present at the meeting did not join in the discussion, as happens at any faculty meeting, for two hours people spoke honestly of their confusions and ignorance, and there were expressions of ambivalence and uncertainty. It was a powerful, memorable, human time of caring, of vulnerability, and a sharing of personal experiences. What had been invisible to many became visible, known, familiar, and spoken. Did the recognition and acceptance of a publication contribute to priming this public conversation? Looking back, the seemingly isolated events in different divisions of Bank Street probably had more impact than we perceived. Time and events were influencing the whole institution, not just its parts. Most critically, the increasingly visible, assertive, and national presence of gay and lesbian people created a new societal context that also influenced the consciousness of the Bank Street community.

Time, acknowledgment, and the determined efforts of individuals and groups of individuals have led to a changed social atmosphere and consciousness within Bank Street College. There are public notices announcing meetings of gay and lesbian students and faculty; there are more changes in courses. In what follows, I describe the changes I have made over the past three years in the Foundations course I teach.

The first third of the course examines the history of changing educational aims in elementary and early childhood education in the United States. As a transition to the next major topic, issues of equity, the students read George Counts's (1932/1978) Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? During these sessions on equity, we focus on the effects of classism, racism, and sexism on educational aims, and students are asked to write a paper on an equity issue. Frequently, students choose to write about equity issues of particular interest to them that have not been discussed in depth in class, such as disability and bilingualism. While Steve, Virginia, and Elaine were conducting their research on the experience of gay and lesbian parents in schools, my own awareness was sharpened by our conversations about their work, and I began to devote a small amount of time to sexual orientation as an issue of equity. No one chose to write about this topic, but in the final paper of the course - an educational autobiography - one student wrote of her sexual orientation and her frustration and anger in keeping this secret. Each semester, as I learned more, I gradually increased the time we spent in discussing sexual orientation as an issue of equity. While few students chose this topic for their papers, more students wrote about being lesbian or gay in a homophobic society in their educational autobiographies.

In the spring 1994 semester, I added more articles on sexual orientation and heterosexism to the readings, including the "Briefing Paper on Children of Gay and Lesbian Parents" prepared for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Governing Board (1993), which was sent to all NAEYC affiliates to provide research and information for discussions on inclusion. I also presented to the students the various research projects in which our group was involved, such as children's concept of family and teachers' responses to "Josephine's question" discussed elsewhere in this article. In that semester, I received four papers dealing with sexual orientation as an equity issue. While the perspective of each of the four papers differed in what each chose to discuss, they shared a common theme: each student spoke of the teacher's social responsibility in relation to issues of equity in a democratic society.

For one student, writing the paper was an opportunity for self-examination. She wrote:

I cannot discuss the issue at hand without exposing my biases - biases connected to values crystallized over time by a combination of religious, family, cultural beliefs. Sometimes values can be such a part of us they become habits. We stop thinking about them critically, and simply defend them. While my exploration here will be to critically challenge my values, I recognize that changes in my feelings, attitudes, values will not be instantaneous. This paper is, for me, the beginning of a journey that I know not where it will lead.

to foster unity within their own families; to emphasize that while families may be structured differently - whether it be grandparent and child, mother and child, foster parents and child, two Dads, and so forth, familial love is the important, sustaining criterion that makes a family special.

For another student, the dilemma was different and acutely present. She spoke eloquently of her struggle for integrity:

Like George Counts's call to the school, I feel very strongly about creating an environment for children that transcends the walls of the classroom and is reflective of society (while at the same time reshaping it). To this date I have been very fortunate to have worked in schools that have helped and supported me and my beliefs. Next year, however, I will be working in a school that may not be as open. . . . Similar to gay and lesbian parents, I have the stressful and difficult task of deciding whether or not to disclose to my fellow teachers and administrators the information that I am a lesbian. . . . The fear of personal rejection and a lack of understanding is holding me back from being open about who I am. . . . It is here where I hear Counts's words calling me to take the power and use it. I just hope that I can surrender security, and grab onto some courage, so I can fulfill my responsibility to my own convictions and of those of an educator.

Choosing a More Equitable Future

When I (Jonathan Silin) began teaching in the 1960s, homosexuality was still considered a matter of deviance, a topic perhaps appropriate only to college- level courses on psychological and social pathology. Although I was living much of my life in and through the nascent gay culture of the time, it was not possible to be out at work without risking the loss of my job, a risk I was unprepared to take. Today there are thriving national organizations, such as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Teachers Network; local projects that advocate for gay youth, such as the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York City; and groups that support gay and lesbian families, such as Lesbian and Gay Parents Coalition International. There is also a growing literature for children about gay and lesbian lives and curriculum materials for adults (Chapman, 1992).

There is still a long way to go. In part, this reflects the conservatism of our society and of early childhood education, a field that has depended heavily on the literature of child development as a knowledge base for curricular decisionmaking. Early childhood educators have relied on conceptual and empirical research that distances children from adults and from their material worlds. The study we have described here on children's conceptions of family confirms what others have also maintained; developmental psychologists have frequently underestimated children's abilities to understand complex social issues (Short, 1991). In part, the remaining distance reflects popular cultural images of young children as innocent. Unfortunately, images of childhood innocence are often linked with ideas about childhood ignorance. Teachers and parents want to protect children from knowledge of the social world that they themselves find discomforting (Silin, 1995). As adults we forget that what represents change to us does not necessarily represent change for the children. Many children have never known a world without lesbian and gay families.

As we explore children's knowledge of diverse family structures, recurring questions arise at the heart of teaching (Cuffaro, 1995). To what extent are teachers able to make choices that reflect their educational commitments and to what extent are they limited by the circumstances in which they work? Is it the teacher's role to reflect current societal attitudes or to invite discussion of taken-for-granted attitudes? In response to these questions and the inquiries of our graduate students, we have recently undertaken a study of how teachers who do not have children with gay or lesbian parents in their classrooms discuss this issue with children.

Our research, indeed our own individual histories, indicate two intertwined realities: the central role of early experience in shaping attitudes, and the close connection between affect and understanding. Often, the interviews we conducted with teachers provided them with their first opportunity to explore how the theme of sexual orientation affects their work with children. Although relying on accepted notions of "normal" development, teachers showed themselves to be eager for more information about sexual orientation.

As individuals, we have attitudes and perspectives, and so do classrooms and institutions. Documenting the changes in institutional attitudes at Bank Street, the context in which our work as teachers and as researchers is located - those moments and situations that may be particularly susceptible to change, to questioning, and to the possibility of shifts in perspectives - we have come to understand more deeply that change is a slow process that requires equal parts of patience and persistence. We are also aware of the way that recognition outside of the institution - publications, grants, conference presentations - legitimizes work within its walls.

We recognize that our project is inextricably linked to monumental societal changes that began in the 1950s with the burgeoning civil rights movement. We see our work in the context of the ongoing national debate about an inclusive, as opposed to a monolithic, approach to culture. This article has focused on one equity issue - sexual orientation. Our commitment to build a more equitable society tells us that questioning and acting on behalf of democratic ideals is the most authentic way to fulfill our social responsibility as educators.

References

Antler, J. (1987). Lucy Sprague Mitchell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bernstein, A. (1988). Unraveling the tangles: Children's understanding of stepfamily kinship. In W. R. Beer (Ed.), Relative strangers: Studies of stepfamily processes (pp. 83-111). Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.

Biber, B. (1984). Early education and psychological development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Borke, H. (1975). Piaget's mountain revisited: Changes in the egocentric landscape. Developmental Psychology, 11, 240-443.

Bredekamp, S. (1987). Developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood programs from birth through age 8. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Brodzinsky, D. M., Schechter, D., & Brodzinsky, A. B. (1986). Children's knowledge of adoption: Developmental changes and implications for development. In R. D. Ashmore & D. M. Brodzinsky (Eds.), Thinking about the family: View of parents and children (pp. 205-232). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Camera, K. A. (1979). Children's construction of social knowledge: Concepts of family and the experience of parental divorce. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. (University Microfilms, No. 80-01884)

Casper, V. (1996). Making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. Zero to Three, 16(3), 14-20.

Casper, V., Schultz, S., & Wickens, E. (1992). Breaking the silences: Lesbian and gay parents and the schools. Teachers College Record, 94, 109-137.

Casper, V., & Schultz, S. (1995). Lesbian and gay parents encounter educators: Initiating conversations. In R. Savin-Williams & K. M. Cohen (Eds.), The lives of lesbians, gays and bisexuals: Developmental, clinical and cultural issues (pp. 305-330). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Chapman, S. (1992). The power of children's literature: A rationale for using books on gay and lesbian headed families. Unpublished masters thesis, Bank Street College of Education, New York City.

Chodorow, N. (1992). Heterosexuality as a compromise formation: Reflections on the psychoanalytic theory of sexual development. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 15, 267-304.

Counts, G. S. (1978). Dare the schools build a new social order? Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1932)

Cuffaro, H. K. (1995). Experimenting with the world: John Dewey and the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Donaldson, M. (1978). Children's minds. New York: Norton.

Green, R. (1987). Sissy boy syndrome and the development of homosexuality. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hart, L. S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1984). The child as non-egocentric art critic. Child Development, 55, 2122-2129.

Jackson, P. (1992). Untaught lessons. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kessler, S., & Swadener, B. B. (Eds.). (1992). Reconceptualizing the early childhood curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.

Leavitt, R. (1994). Power and emotion in infant-toddler daycare. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Moore, N. V., Bickhard, M. H., & Cooper, R. G. (1977). The child's development of the concept of family. (ERIC Document No. ED 140,980)

National Association for the Education of Young Children. (1993). Briefing paper on children of gay and lesbian parents (Paper prepared for the Governing Board). Washington, DC: Author.

Newman, J. L., Roberts, L. R., & Syre, C. R. (1993). Concepts of family among children and adolescents: Effects of cognitive level, gender and family structure. Developmental Psychology, 29, 951-962.

Patterson, C. J. (1992). Children of lesbian and gay parents. Child Development, 63, 1025-1042.

Pederson, D. R., & Gilby, R. L. (1986). Children's concepts of the family. In R. Ashmore & D. Brodzinsky (Eds.), Thinking about the family (pp. 181-204). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Piaget, J. (1965). Judgment and reasoning in the child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1928)

Powell, J. A., Wilcher, B. J., Wedemeyer, N. V., & Claypool, P. L. (1981). The young child's developing concept of family. Home Economics Research Journal, 10(22), 137-149.

Shapiro, E., & Nager, N. (1995). A developmental framework for education: Retrospect and prospect. Unpublished manuscript.

Shatz, M., & Gelman, R. (1973). The development of communication skills: Modification in the speech of young children as a function of listener. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 38 (5, No. 152).

Short, G. (1991). Children's grasp of controversial issues. In M. Woodhead, P. Light, & R. Carr (Eds.), Growing up in a changing society (pp. 333-351). New York: Routledge.

Silin, J. (1995). Sex, death and the education of children: Our passion for ignorance in the age of AIDS. New York: Teachers College Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1934)

Watson, M. W., & Amgott-Kwan, T. (1984). Development of family-role concepts in school-age children. Developmental Psychology, 20, 953-959.

Wedemeyer, N. V., Bickhard, M. H., & Cooper, R. G. (1989). The development of structural complexity in the child's concept of family: The effect of cognitive stage, sex and intactness. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 150, 341-357.

Wickens, E. (1993). Penny's question: "I will have a child in my class with two moms - What do you know about this?" Young Children, 48(3), 25-28.

Wickens, E. (1994). Anna Day and the O-ring. Boston: Alyson Press.

Wickens, E., & Schultz, S. (1994). "I will have a child in my class with two moms, two lesbians. What do you know about this?" In F. Pignatelli & S. W. Pflaum (Eds.), Experiencing diversity: Toward educational equity (pp. 96-114). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

We want to thank all the parents and educators interviewed in the course of our research, and most especially Robin Abeshaus, Lisa Barish, Toby Weinberger, and David Wolkenberg, who collaborated with us on the study of children's conceptions of family. Over the years, Rob Caramella, Sandra Chapman, and Kathleen Hayes have also supported our work. Edna K. Shapiro provided insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Paul Rapoport Foundation and the Bank Street College of Education Minigrant Program.

Notes

¹ All quotes in this section are from interviews conducted as a part of a research study reported in Casper, Schultz, and Wickens (1992). In the interest of confidentiality, the names of participants have been changed.

Harvard Education Publishing Group Homepage

Harvard Educational Review Homepage

Harvard Education Letter Homepage

news

About HEPG

Harvard Education Publishing Group