The Goal of the Study

The goal of this study (2014-2020) was to video interview LGBTQ families across Ontario about their experiences in public schools and share our findings from these interviews with teachers, community educators, and other LGBTQ families.

We use the initialism LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer) with the intention of including people who identify as transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual, agender, gender queer, gender variant, and/or pangender. We understand the names people use to describe their gender and sexual identities are always evolving and that the most important thing is to be respectful and to use names that people prefer.

The study includes:
  • video and audio interviews with 37 LGBTQ parents, youth, and families in seven Ontario cities (Toronto, Oshawa, Ottawa, Sudbury, London, St. Thomas, and Acton) and surrounding suburbs and rural communities;  
  • an archive of approximately 300 video clips from the interviews on this website; and
  • a multi-media verbatim theatre production, called Out at School, which includes direct conversations and monologues from the interviews, a set of visual images, and three original songs.
To read a final report of the study please go to our Publications link.
 While the original goal of the website was to house the video clips from the interview study so we could share our findings with teachers, principals, community educators, and other LGBTQ families, the website has grown over the years in a number of ways.
 
The News Blog
Our news blog links the findings of our study to current news and events of interest to local, provincial, national, and international LGBTQ communities.  The blog also features news about research and artistic projects being conducted by members of the research team, which over the six years of the study, includes 15 team members.  The leader writer of the news blog is team member Bishop Owis who also leads the team’s social media work.  Our social media channels include:

  • Instagram @gaileyroadproductions (focuses on our own and others’ queer art activism)
  • Tara Goldstein’s LinkedIn posts (focuses on academic conversations around gender, sexuality and schooling)
  • Twitter @gaileyroad (draws from both Instagram and LinkedIn posts)
 
The Out at School Pages
Our multi-media verbatim theatre production Out at School has been performed at a variety of conferences and festivals in the last several years.  Our Out at School Pages document our performances, contain biographies of our cast and crew, provide short video documentaries of the performances, and include the music and some of the images that appear in the production.  
 
Our Podcast Gender. Sexuality. School.
Our podcast Gender. Sexuality. School. features interviews with established and emerging researchers working in the area of gender, sexuality and schooling.  The team thinks of our podcast work as a digital literature review of cutting-edge research on issues of gender and sexuality at school.  
 
Tara Goldstein began Season Three in January 2021.     
 
Publications
The Publications pages include access to the final report of the study and publications that share our findings from the study.
 
Resources
The Resources pages contains the bibliography the research team put together when we first designed the study, the reading list from Tara Goldstein’s last Gender, Sexuality and Schooling graduate education course at OISE, and a superb education and community resource list prepared by Bishop Owis that includes a wide variety of resources:  curriculum documents, policy documents, support lines, community workshop resources, and a comprehensive list of community organizations, government forms, and mental health services.

A selection of our video clips...