Accomplishments
Teacher Preparedness towards Handling Homophobic Bullying In Classrooms
- Abstract
The Indian LGBTQ youths face a lot of rejections at all spheres of life –family, school, workplace or any other groups to which they belong. This is due to the expected cultural norms about the gender binaries and heterosexual life partners. The family honour puts undue pressure on the LGBTQ students to fulfil expectations of gender roles .The harassment of the LGBTQ students is often an unattended area at schools. We have many kids like Aarvay Malhotra who committed suicide due to bullying faced at the hands of the peers .Such students who face rejection at family, school and peer group face mental health issues in the form of self-doubt. The homophobic comments often get internalised in he LGBTQ students. This further leads to suicidal ideation .Teachers can be instrumental in addressing such issues in the classrooms. They need to be aware of their own roles in being a teacher who aims to create a safe inclusive classroom for the LGBTQ students .Apart from this they need to be skilled enough to handle such LGBTQ inclusive classrooms The present research study aims towards exploring the preparedness of teachers in order to handle homophobic bullying of students belonging to the LGBT community .The qualitative study will collect responses from the pre-service teachers and the responses will be transcribed to get the codes and themes using the thematic analysis. The study will justify the need for the teacher education colleges to work towards LGBTQ inclusive curriculum at teacher preparation level. The present research study aims to answer the following research questions. R Q What is the level of preparedness for the pre-service teachers towards handling bullying of the LGBTQ students in classrooms? Keywords: homophobic bullying, suicidal ideation, LGBTQ inclusive curriculum, Teacher preparedness