Real Steps You Can Take to Make Your Homeschool More Intersectionally Aware

Don’t let the fact that intersectional homeschooling is a work in progress deter you from making it part of your own homeschool.

Intersectionality seems theoretical, but it’s meant to be a practical, ongoing project — and it’s easier to bring it into your everyday homeschool than you might think. When we think about learning, we tend to think about it in terms of finding answers, but intersectional homeschooling often starts with asking better questions.

Recognize different experiences. This can be as simple as remembering that, for example, not all women had the same experience with winning the vote in the United States — Black women who joined in protest marches were asked to move to the back. It can also be as difficult as asking someone you’ve only recently met what pronouns they prefer, but in order to be genuinely open to acknowledging differences, you have to be aware of them. This can be hard because we’ve been taught that it’s rude to formally recognize these kinds of differences, but if we’re not willing to be brave enough to face differences when we find them, we’re likely to get stuck in our assumptions.

Get familiar with what your learning leaves out. Any curriculum can become an intersectional-friendly curriculum because intersectionalism is about looking for who or what has been excluded from the central narrative. Take time to probe the resources you’re using to look for the stories, people, and experiences who are left out — you may start by asking “What were the poorest people doing?” or “Where were the Native Americans while this was happening?” Seek out other points of view. Because resources tend to reflect the strongest power structure, it can be difficult to find sources from other perspectives. It’s challenging sometimes even when you do because work outside the central narrative rarely comes from the same educational background or has the same associated resources and commentary that you find inside the canon. It’s worth finding and using these resources anyway, even if it feels like you are having to start from scratch.

Don’t be afraid to be complicated. Sure, it’s easier to say “Women’s experiences during the Gold Rush were very different from men’s experiences,” but the default for these kinds of generalizations tends to be cis white heterosexual people. Those stories matter, too, but we should be very careful not to pretend those stories are somehow representative experiences. Any time a resource highlights people who match your experiences as a baseline, be ready to seek out other points of view.

Ask questions about your curriculum. Just asking these kinds of questions is a step toward more intentional homeschooling.

• WHO CREATED IT? Homeschool curricula can be hard to pin down in this arena, but it’s worth hunting down the academic credentials of its creators as well as whatever you can find out about their place in the power matrix. You definitely don’t have to forego otherwise great curriculum because it’s created by a person in a dominant power structure, but you want to be aware of what might be missed or left out because of it. (That’s true for this article, too!)

• WHO IS THIS CURRICULUM ABOUT? It’s a common joke that sex-ed books seem to be written exclusively for cis heterosexual white people because that’s what all the pictures in the books seem to show, but every curriculum comes with built-in biases. That’s okay — what’s important is recognizing those biases when you see them and putting together a curriculum that includes more people than it leaves out.

• WHO BENEFITS? This isn’t necessarily about dollars and cents, though financial aspects can certainly come into it. More, it’s about considering what the bigger influence of a particular program might be — if everyone used this program, what would everyone know because of that? And what — or who — would be left out?

• ARE THE MESSAGES HELPFUL OR HARMFUL? Often, the answer to this question is complicated. You may want to go through a series of questions about common intersections (gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, nationality, class, race, etc.) and ask “How does this curriculum support this experience? How does it marginalize it?” Often a lack of intersectionalism is inadvertent — part of the challenge is that people inside a dominant power structure tend to be oblivious to that fact — so identifying potentially harmful messages isn’t about trashing a curriculum but about adjusting it to make your homeschool more inclusive while you are using it.

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