SPEAKER_00: Heroes and holidays is not how we should be teaching.
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Queering Education, where we challenge what school is and build what it should be.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian Stanton.
SPEAKER_01: This is a Teaching Well Queer podcast about inclusive teaching, queer pedagogy, and showing up authentically in every classroom.
SPEAKER_01: All right, let's do the work.
SPEAKER_01: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Queering Education.
SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Brian Stanton.
SPEAKER_01: My pronouns are they, them.
SPEAKER_01: Today we are doing live uh podcast interviews from the New Jersey Education Association.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'm so excited to be here.
SPEAKER_01: Uh first and foremost, I've got up Steve.
SPEAKER_01: Hi, Steve.
SPEAKER_01: Steve, Steven?
SPEAKER_01: Steve.
SPEAKER_01: Steve, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01: I'm great.
SPEAKER_01: How are you?
SPEAKER_01: I'm well, thanks.
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell everybody who's listening a little bit about about yourself, how you identify, uh what your role in education is?
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: So uh my name is Steve Kamoulis.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a outqueer uh gay educator.
SPEAKER_00: Uh my pronouns are he, him.
SPEAKER_00: I teach high school history uh in Middletown, New Jersey.
SPEAKER_00: And um I'm also I also hold different roles in the uh in the association.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm my local first vice president uh and uh corresponding secretary of the county, and I am on the executive committee for the NJAA.
SPEAKER_00: I love that so much.
SPEAKER_01: I love the combination of education and advocacy that you do.
SPEAKER_01: Um let's talk a little bit about what got you into education.
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's really what gets anybody into education, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's the impact of uh sharing my love of content, my love of history, and my love of really different kinds of history.
SPEAKER_00: You know, every history teacher has their um has their passion.
SPEAKER_00: My passion is social history.
SPEAKER_00: So I like social movements, I like uh the stories of people and how those people affect the greater story of history.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not a battles person, I'm not a war person.
SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, I love women's history, I love queer history, um, and so on.
SPEAKER_00: And then about 17 years ago, uh I met Kate Oakson, who I hope comes in to speak to you.
SPEAKER_00: Um she she and I uh and a group of other people started this uh group called Make It Better for Youth, which was one of the spearheading groups that brought the inclusive curricular mandate to the state for LGBT uh history.
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
SPEAKER_01: Which is awesome.
SPEAKER_01: That is awesome.
SPEAKER_01: I am a huge fan of mandates that have queer inclusive education.
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm also learning more and more about curricular resources from other nonprofits and whatnot that exists, so it's been really exciting.
SPEAKER_01: When I actually went to get my teaching credential, I got it in history because I love history and I love storytelling.
SPEAKER_01: My background is in theater, so I ended up with a theater credential also.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's what I've been primarily teaching.
SPEAKER_01: But I I was seeking out history because of the storytelling aspect of it.
SPEAKER_01: Again, I'm not a battles person, I'm not a memorization memorization person, I'm not here for the dates, but I love the idea of telling stories.
SPEAKER_01: My favorite novels are actually like historical fiction because I love the combination of like real and fake because it just makes the story so compelling.
SPEAKER_01: So I love what you do.
SPEAKER_01: It it was definitely like a path that existed for me for a while.
SPEAKER_01: Nice.
SPEAKER_01: How do you see your queerness showing up in the work that you do in education?
SPEAKER_01: You've already given us some insight by doing the advocacy work for the career uh queer curricular uh inclusion.
SPEAKER_01: Um how do you see it showing up on the day-to-day in your classroom?
SPEAKER_00: So I so again, about 17 years ago, um, I started the first GSA at my high school.
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't like my personally, I wasn't out until there was a problem, like many of us, right?
SPEAKER_00: So once that occurred, every you know, everybody knew.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then the situation with Tyler Clemente happened.
SPEAKER_00: So there was a push to bring GSAs to high schools to uh try to help our students to be, you know, their authentic selves and to be successful.
SPEAKER_00: So I was right in there, and that's also when I met Kate.
SPEAKER_00: And it my worlds just came together.
SPEAKER_00: So for the so for the past 16, 17 years, I've been really truly trying to marry in my classroom with um my curriculum, which I've also uh uh included prior to that.
SPEAKER_00: It's just a thing.
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
SPEAKER_00: Um because it's it's important for the kids to see themselves in the story, right?
SPEAKER_00: And teaching history, you have that unique ability to easily interplot other people's stories so that you that they may not be exposed to.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: I know, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_01: No, no apologies.
SPEAKER_01: I I it's it's a fascinating thing.
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm learning a lot more about queer history now as an adult than I ever did when I was in actual schooling, uh even in graduate school.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I do find it fascinating when there are these moments where you can just throw a nut, a nugget of information that's like this is a representation that you may not have realized.
SPEAKER_00: And it's also like I'm I'm a big believer that we should not be putting heroes and holidays out there, right?
SPEAKER_00: You should not be saying, oh, okay, here's Leonardo da Vinci, and it's believed he was gay, or here is Harvey Milk, here is, you know, uh oh my God.
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: I know you're gonna edit a lot of this out.
SPEAKER_00: I will edit.
SPEAKER_00: We're not live.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but heroes and holidays is not how we should be teaching because that only brings a definition, right?
SPEAKER_00: When we teach history, we're teaching about the interconnectedness of the people to the actual story that is happening in whatever you're studying, right?
SPEAKER_00: So it's not it's also not about people only, um, like individuals only.
SPEAKER_00: It's about uh greater ideas of gender expression.
SPEAKER_00: So one of the lessons I teach, my students often giggle when I show them the Louis XIV picture, right?
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, why is he wearing high heels?
SPEAKER_00: He must be gay.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, well, no.
SPEAKER_00: However, um, you know, men wore high heels to show power.
SPEAKER_00: And then even better, I say, you know, I went um on the Met Art site and I saw other examples of high heels that men wore that had guns on them or whatever, and everybody's and everybody just goes silent for a minute and they realize like, what do you wear that shows your expression?
SPEAKER_00: What do you wear that shows your gender expression?
SPEAKER_00: What do you wear that shows who you are as an individual?
SPEAKER_00: And how do you make that powerful uh impact?
SPEAKER_00: So it's oftentimes thinking of things in different ways.
SPEAKER_00: So you're you know, you're hitting the mandates, but you're also making the students think about the content in a way that other teachers would not.
SPEAKER_00: And hopefully the work I do and the work that we're doing with the consortium and things um does that.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: I'm curious about how you think that um people can learn from our history in our present moment.
SPEAKER_00: There are always there are always situations when you're teaching where somebody would turn around and just innocently raise their hand and say, this actually reminds me of whatever is going on, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like the the present uh ballroom issue, right?
SPEAKER_00: Uh why do we need the ballroom?
SPEAKER_00: Why is that being built?
SPEAKER_00: How is the decoration of the ballroom and the changing of the decoration of the White House and the Oval Office and whatnot signaling certain things?
SPEAKER_00: And that comes up every year for the past couple of years uh when I teach when Louis XIV built Versailles.
SPEAKER_00: So then it often finds its way because I'm also not the type of teacher that gives a worksheet and says, complete this, and then we'll talk about only those answers.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I oftentimes have questions on the board that are bigger picture questions that at the end of the block the conversation really truly starts.
SPEAKER_00: So the past informs the present, and you need to uh understand that in order to go on to the future.
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01: Uh speaking of the present moment that we're in, what kind of message would you like to send out to queer educators who are listening?
SPEAKER_00: Please have the courage to include these stories in your lessons, whether it's history where it's easier, English, where it's easier.
SPEAKER_00: But I have several um science colleagues who do uh who do projects on modern scientists.
SPEAKER_00: And she came to me and and asked me, well, how do I find this?
SPEAKER_00: And I looked up the website about I think it's like 500 queer scientists, something like that.
SPEAKER_00: And she uses that as um as a resource for her kids.
SPEAKER_00: You know, math teachers come up to me, they're like, How do I include it?
SPEAKER_00: And I had another friend who does, hey, I don't teach math, so here we go.
SPEAKER_00: Who does a design project with shapes, geometry, that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Well, how can I include?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Well, why don't you simply just make a rainbow flag and have that be one of the options that you can make?
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's all about showing the equation, it's all about showing what you do, but you're producing whatever the kid wants to produce, and then you get that buy-in, right?
SPEAKER_00: If I was, I always I always think, if I was that kid in that classroom, I mean, now, uh not necessarily the 90s, but uh, but if I was that kid in that classroom and I knew that I had the ability to have that connect to what is being taught, life would be a lot different.
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I think all the time when um when I'm real when I'm trying to open their minds.
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate that.
SPEAKER_01: I I definitely love the integration into different curricular spaces.
SPEAKER_01: I think that you're absolutely correct, that it's just a matter of providing the choice.
SPEAKER_01: Um and I don't want to keep you too much in your conference, so I want to thank you so much for your time and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being a part of Queering Education.
SPEAKER_01: This is a Teaching While Queer podcast.
SPEAKER_01: Take what you need from this conversation and bring it back into your classroom and your students.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian Stanton.
SPEAKER_01: Until next time, keep showing up.