The Inclusivity Challenge: Is Canada a Just Society?

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Originally published in TEACH Magazine, 50th Anniversary of the Decriminalization of Homosexuality in Canada Special Issue, 2019

By Ian Duncan

Sure Will & Grace is back on TV, but students are watching several LGBTQ+ characters on Netflix’s Riverdale and binge-watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. It seems many of your students are more comfortable with LGBTQ+ topics than you think.

I’m challenging you to include the LGBTQ+ community in your teaching. Commemorative events, like the 50th Anniversary of the Decriminalization of Homosexuality in Canada, help us all to reflect on the changes and progress of the last half-century. It also shows us what has stayed the same.

Discrimination and prejudice against members of the LGBTQ+ community persists. Decriminalization, 50 years ago, did not bring equal rights, equitable treatment, inclusion, acceptance, or tolerance. But it did give the LGBTQ+ community an opportunity to work towards those ends.

This is the space for us, as educators, to continue this progress in our classrooms. Fifty years ago, homosexuality was decriminalized. It’s interesting to me that even in calling it out as “decriminalization,” we are acknowledging that it was (and in some countries still is) criminal. Homosexuality is not a crime, and should never have been one. Yet members of the LGBTQ+ community are often treated as though it still is.

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Ian Duncan is a husband, father, and a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. Teaching history since 2003, his classroom focuses on inquiry, critical thinking, and community to engage students’ curiosity about the world in which we live. He enjoys Instagram, is trying to tweet, and has a complicated relationship with anything chocolate.

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Ian Duncan
Ian Duncan
Ian Duncan is a husband, father, and a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community. Teaching history since 2003, his classroom focuses on inquiry, critical thinking, and community to engage students’ curiosity about the world in which we live. He enjoys Instagram, is trying to tweet, and has a complicated relationship with anything chocolate.

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