The Trump administration continues to push for banning some, if not all, transgender people from the military, despite all four service chiefs asserting that the presence of transgender troops has caused no harm. At the same time, one Department of Defense program has launched a new professional development course for staff at military-affiliated childcare centers and youth programs on how to create safe, inclusive spaces for gender-expansive and LGBTQ children.
The Department of Defense Child Development Virtual Lab School (VLS) is a research-based online professional development system for the 33,000 child- and youth-care professionals working with children of military families on bases around the world. Created in 2009, the VLS offers an easy way for staff to build their knowledge and skills. It was designed and created by a team of faculty and staff at The Ohio State University, in collaboration with the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture.
While any child- and youth-care program must address staff training needs, military-affiliated programs have special issues. Many of their staff are military spouses who relocate frequently. Staff turnover and training can be particularly challenging, so an online training program that can be accessed anywhere is ideal.
Sarah Lang, associate director of research and professional development at VLS, led the creation of the “Creating Gender Safe Spaces” course, which launched April 24. “Part of the reason we developed this course was that people working in military childcare saw gender-expansive kids and reached out to us,” she said in an interview. They would say, “I’m not sure what to do” and ask “What’s the best way to approach this?”
We want to be supportive of children and families with gender-expansive or LGBT members, and to arm staff with tools to navigate conversations with other families.
Lang, who has been an early childhood teacher and has a doctorate in human development and family science, explained, “We want to be supportive of children and families with gender-expansive or LGBT members, and to arm staff with tools to navigate conversations with other families,” ones who might have questions or make unwitting remarks.
She sees the course as having a wider applicability, too. “It’s really about a way to think about everyone’s ability to be who they are,” she said. “It provides a new space to challenge ourselves and think about the boxes we sometimes put other people in, to help us reconceptualize things and think about the world differently.” She said that sometimes the military spouses staffing childcare and youth programs are young, only 18 or 19, and thus may not have had higher education opportunities that encourage them “to think about the world and other people’s experiences more broadly.”
The course, which targets those working with children from birth through age 12, includes six modules: Creating Safe Spaces: An Introduction for Program Staff (which includes terminology and different ways to think about gender identity); Understanding Development for Gender-Expansive and Transgender Children and Youth; Supporting Gender-Expansive Children Creates Safe Spaces for All; Diversity within Families; Creative Programs that Support All Children; and Supporting More Inclusive Programs From an Administrative Perspective. Each module includes extensive explanations of ideas and concepts, ways of taking action, sample scenarios and responses, practice activities, quiz questions, and more. They draw both from academic research and from well-respected programs for and about LGBTQ children and youth, like Gender Spectrum, GLSEN, HRC’s Welcoming Schools, and San Francisco State University’s Family Acceptance Project.
One of the things that makes this course powerful is the families willing to open their lives and share stories with us.
In numerous short videos throughout the modules, too, parents talk about experiences with their own gender-expansive children, while faculty in early childhood development discuss broader themes, like creating a classroom that supports all children, choosing thoughtful classroom materials, and how administrators can assist diversity and inclusion efforts. Lang emphasizes, “One of the things that makes this course powerful is the families willing to open their lives and share stories with us.”
“Creating Gender Safe Spaces” is one of several optional courses for staff at military-run childcare and youth programs, Lang explained, although VLS also offers required foundational courses. She added that the entire VLS website had 1.1 million page views last month.
She noted, too, that there are a total of one million children in U.S. military families worldwide. One quarter of them are in military-run childcare or youth programs. Because three quarters of them are not, however, the VLS modules are free and open to the public per Department of Defense requirements. That way, childcare professionals working with children of military families in non-military programs also have access to them. Military-affiliated staff may earn credentialing through an associated learning management system, however, which the public cannot access. Before the November 2016 election, the VLS team had been having some preliminary talks with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families about piloting a public credentialing system, which would have required additional funding. Lang says these conversations have now halted.
Lang has a personal connection to the work as the surrogate for a two-dad family. “I’m interested in making LGBT individuals feel safe in whatever space they’re in,” she explained. She herself is raising two elementary-school kids, and one has a friend who is gender expansive. Creating the VLS course gave her and her child “good language” and information they could use, she said, and she is excited about offering it to others.
So far, feedback on the course has been positive. “It’s been very affirming that people have wanted it and are excited about it. It’s meeting a need,” she said. “It’s a beautiful use of our tax dollars.”