Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 8:00 PM until Eastern Daylight Time UTC -04:00
In schools and classrooms in the United States and across the world, LGBTQIA+ youth are under attack from practices that belittle and exclude them based on their identities. Many educators and activists have focused on the necessary and important work of fighting against bullying, book bans, restrictive bathroom policies, and exclusionary sports policies. At the same time, a broader conversation has been taking place among education and civic leaders about what a more utopian vision of schools for queer and trans youth might look like—schools that don’t just protect queer and trans students but affirm them.Scott Storm ’08 has been a vital participant in these conversations. As a founding teacher of a New York City public high school and now an education professor and researcher, Scott has been working toward this kind of social justice education with queer and trans youth for over 15 years. As part of LGBTQ+ History Month, and in partnership with Swarthmore’s LGBTQ+ Alum Network, please join Scott for a discussion about how education systems can center the voices and ideas of queer and trans youth while working toward more utopian visions of schools. He will explore how to design school structures, curriculum, and pedagogies so that queer and trans youth are not only safe but also thrive in schools, even within contemporary policy landscapes.