Teaching While Queer

✨ Meet Dakota!

This summer, we’re excited to welcome Dakota as one of our interns through New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). One of Dakota’s first projects was imagining a new way to help us share Teaching While Q***r’s mission.

Meet Prism. 🌈

Prism was designed to make conversations about allyship, inclusive classrooms, belonging, and respectful language feel approachable for educators, students, families, and allies alike.

What we love most is the thought behind the design. Rather than simply creating another rainbow character, Dakota chose a prism because a prism transforms one beam of light into a spectrum of colors. To Dakota, that represents how different identities, experiences, and perspectives come together to build stronger, more welcoming communities.

But this is just the beginning.

Over the next several weeks, Dakota will also be sharing a student perspective on education, including what Dakota believes q***r educators should hear before students return to school this fall. We can’t wait for you to follow along and learn alongside us.

Thank you, Dakota, for bringing creativity, thoughtfulness, and heart to Teaching While Q***r. 💜

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Meet today’s guest on Q***ring Education: Steve Koumoulis 🌈

Steve is an out q***r educator, high school history teacher, and education advocate whose work has helped shape LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum in New Jersey. In this conversation, we explore why teaching q***r history is about so much more than “heroes and holidays,” how every subject can make room for authentic representation, and what it means to create classrooms where students truly see themselves reflected.

Whether you teach history, math, science, English, the arts—or anything in between—Steve shares practical ideas for making inclusion part of everyday teaching, not just a special lesson.

🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and let us know: What’s one way you’ve made your classroom more inclusive?

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