This site is designed to provide faculty members, instructors, and TAs with information about how to create an LGBTQ-friendly educational experience for students.
What’s LGBTQ anyway? It stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning, and this site is designed to be a resource package – a place where you can find information about a host of things that can contribute to building an accepting, safe, affirmative environment for LGBTQ students both inside and outside of the classroom. As you make your way through this site, you’ll see that we have provided all sorts of Information, Resources, and Suggestions – like what do I do if…? We hope that it meets your needs and we welcome your feedback. Indeed, providing feedback is easy – just visit our Feedback page and let us know what you think.
Why is it important to create an LGBTQ-friendly educational experience? Some LGBTQ students experience the educational environment as unsafe or discriminatory, which can present a challenge to the amount of learning that can occur in the classroom. Importantly, discrimination can present in unintentional ways by well-meaning educators who do not have the information that they need to ensure an LGBTQ-friendly educational experience. See our Benefits page to find out more about why it is important to create this type of affirmative environment
The development of this site was funded through a Stony Brook University Presidential Mini-Grant for Diversity Issues. We (see Who We Are to find out more about us) designed this site with the intention to provide practical information that addresses the needs of faculty and students. To do so, we surveyed faculty and students at SBU and across the country and received hundreds of responses about good and bad experiences in the classroom, problems people were struggling with, as well as things people found helpful. The information contained in this site reflects these responses.
We want this website to meet your needs. So, please let us know whether it does or not, what else you’d like to see, and how we might improve it. You can provide us with feedback here.