A collection of curriculum-friendly teaching resources and materials featuring topics supporting 2SLGBTQI representation and inclusion within the Ontario curriculum.
The Relearn and React Series is a collection of ready-to-use toolkits with companion videos to help you introduce 2SLGBTQI content while cultivating inclusive classrooms.
Featuring a range of subjects including Health and Physical Education, Canadian and World Studies, Math, Art, and English — the toolkits highlight 2SLGBTQI representation and inclusion within the Ontario curriculum for grades 7-11.
Each toolkit includes:
- An educational video dedicated to the subject
- A detailed teaching guide on how to tackle the topic and guide your
students through their learning journey - A list to help you connect this topic to the current teaching curriculum
- Tailorable pre-video questions and reflection prompts
- Resources to support productive and engaging post-video discussions
- Exercises on how to help students put their knowledge into practice
- Additional resources to enrich the class according to your need
Join Egale’s learning management system (LMS) to access our Relearn and React Series.
Relearn and React Series Toolkits
Queer Love Letters
For Grade 11 – English
Learn about This Toolkit
Love letters play a crucial role in the history of English and world literature. In this toolkit, students will learn how, in addition to traditional love letter rules, queer love letters have often been exchanged secretly by conveying forbidden messages in ciphers and metaphors.
In the period when many of these letters were written, love outside the parameters of heteronormativity was forbidden by law, making many queer love letters a crime. This will bring value to your classroom by highlighting the beauty of queer love stories and their poetic power.
Learning outcomes for this toolkit include:
- Discern how to interact with the love letter genre.
- Situate texts in the love letter genre.
- Discern the dangers that the 2SLGBTQI community faced in writing love letters.
- Learn how love language can be coded and deciphered.
The Art of Drag
For Grade 9 – Drama (Arts)
Learn about this toolkit
The toolkit provides a comprehensive and engaging exploration of drag as both a contemporary phenomenon and a deeply rooted tradition with a rich history and cultural significance worldwide. The teaching resource delves into the complexities of the gender binary and gender expression and helps students understand the political and social dimensions of our performance of gender. By exploring these themes, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the art of drag and its role in challenging gender norms and cultural expectations.
Learning outcomes for this toolkit include:
- Read, discuss, and reflect on the history of drag
- Analyze how drag/gender performance, as an art and communicative practice, can be employed to work toward social justice.
- Explain the notion of drag as a multimedia form of art.
- Articulate how gender, race, sexuality, representation, performance, and culture relate to drag
- Reflect on and apply new drag-related concepts and information to hands-on experiences
Math is for Everyone
For Grade 9 – Math
Learn about this toolkit
Does a mathematician’s life and gender identity matter in the eye of science? Can we truly appreciate their contribution to STEM if we detach them from their age, culture, and society?
While using this toolbox, you will be tasked with a difficult but essential task in your students’ learning journey: challenging math and the realm of STEM as an objective, bias-free field. In order to do so, this toolkit will provide you with seven revised biographies of queer mathematicians to help you question how queer erasure and straightwashing affected the field of math and the world of sciences in general. It will empower your students to see themselves represented in STEM and demonstrate that intersectional 2SLGBTQI identities bring value to our work and everything that we do!
Learning outcomes for this toolkit include:
Understand how queer advocacy and representation belong in all classrooms
Situate 2SLGBTQI lives within the field of mathematics.
Discern the dangers of queer erasure and whitewashing in the sciences.
Understand how “objective” sciences are a product of non-objective societies.
Learn how queer erasure fosters forms of negative bias towards 2SLGBTQI folks in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and beyond.
Inclusion in Sport
For Grade 9 – Health and Physical Education
Learn about this toolkit
The main goal of this toolkit is simple: we want all students to feel safe and be proud of doing sports. Sports are good for them: good for their health, mind, and social life. Due to historical exclusion, binary gendered systems, and barriers to access, 2SLGBTQI youth have been discouraged from engaging in sport which can impact social relationships and community building.
We would love to help you build pride in your students and their ability to participate in sport. In order to do so, we created five new principles inspired by the ancient Olympics to foster diversity and inclusion in sport and in your classroom:
- Embrace your beauty
- Love is your strength
- Foster peace
- Represent your community
- Share your joy
Learning outcomes for this toolkit include:
- Reflect on simple principles for schools and sport teams to create and maintain a respectful and safe athletic climate for 2SLGBTQI students and students belonging to equity-deserving groups.
- Identify how anti-2SLGBTQI bias in athletics and physical education affects individual students’ experience of sport and school life.
- Discuss and integrate practical and effective strategies for addressing anti-2SLGBTQI bias in sport.
Where It Happens: 2SLGBTQI Activism in Toronto and Across Canada
For Grade 11 – Canadian/World Studies
Learn about this toolkit
Following the microhistory framework, this toolkit focuses on the history of 2SLGBTQI activism in Toronto and across Canada. Instead of celebrating macro-events of Canadian colonial history, we are going to build space and give voice to equally important but often forgotten historical events that do not typically figure in mainstream narratives. In this specific case, the “when” will share the stage with the “where.” This toolkit will devote particular attention not only to 2SLGBTQI activism but to the locations where activism happened.
Learning outcomes for this toolkit include:
- Recognize some of the significant events that have contributed to 2SLGBTQI community development in Toronto and across Canada.
- Describe the enduring impacts of these events and social action on Canadian society as a whole.
- Recognize ways they might contribute to the advancement of human rights using collective action.
- Identify strategies that students can use to make a difference and contribute to social action.
The Relearn and React Series is a project funded by the Ontario Ministry of Education with the goal of equipping educators with curriculum-aligned resources to foster learning for all students and create safer and more inclusive schools for 2SLGBTQI students.
