All Inc! Building LGBT+ friendly schools across Europe
UP4Diversity benefits from exchanges with its European Network and, through that, from exposure to projects that seek to promote awareness, understanding and acceptance of the LGBT+ community. One such project is All Inc!, an ERASMUS+ partnership coordinated by Maastricht University.
All Inc! focuses explicitly on education. It aims to build LGBT+ friendly learning environments through country-based partnerships between secondary schools and teacher training institutions in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. In addition to academic research, All Inc! takes a practical turn: partners co-create LGBT+ friendly school visions and develop 'tools for schools' to implement those visions. Throughout, partners help build a 'Human Library' of stories from pupils, teachers, parents and the wider school community.
As a partner in both projects, KU Leuven is keen to ensure that what we learn in one project can be used in another. In that spirit, the upcoming All Inc! publication features the UP4Diversity research, and a first introduction to 'upstanders' has been shared with all project partners. The Human Library, too, will feature stories around upstanders, and will share some of the practices we have come across through our UP4Diversity work.
Looking across these two projects, an early lesson emerges. Both project recognise the importance of focusing not only on education, but on the wider school community, in tackling bullying and violence against young people who identify as LGBT+. All Inc! does this by explicitly inviting the wider school community in its research and activities; UP4Diversity through a targeted focus on youth workers. The research conducted by both projects to date, and the implementation of the first activities, underlines just how important it is to provide young people with a safe space within but also beyond the classroom. It can be difficult, however, to bring those two worlds together.
The link between a young person's school and their extra-curricular activities varies significantly from country to country. In some places, music and sports are closely connected to the school, while in others they are offered completely independently. As a result, young people may find themselves in an open and inclusive school, but with a very different experience outside of it - and vice versa. In such cases, teachers may be confronted with problems they cannot meaningfully address: for example, if a pupils is bullied at their youth club, and acts out in the classroom. Conversely, a youth workers may pick up on bullying in the classroom, but may find that the school and/or teacher is not open to a conversation about this subject.
Building links between the 'inside' and 'outside' world of pupils can help overcome this. This asks that schools be open to working with others, and that others are open to working with schools. Community-wide approaches are easiest where all the services offered - education, sports, music and other youth activities - are organised publicly, for example by the local council or country. In those cases, setting up conversations with public officials can be a first step towards a more all-encompassing approach, and towards appropriate training for the people involved (teachers, youth workers, civil servants and so on).
For some, this will read like pie-in-the-sky thinking. It does not need to be - but it would help to better understand and highlight the cases where this approach has been taken, and where it has delivered results. Project partners will continue to explore these and other strategies, and we look forward to reporting back on them. In the meantime, we warmly invite everyone to follow our All Inc! activities through this blog, and to contact us with any questions or comments.
