Overview
Parent Services Project is proud to share our groundbreaking early childhood curriculum, Making Room in the Circle: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Families in Early Childhood Settings. This curriculum has been developed to assist early childhood providers to create welcoming, high-quality environments that actively include LGBT families, and diminish the silence, taboo and bias that target LGBT families and harm all children. What are the core elements of the curriculum? Making Room in the Circle is an interactive curriculum based on solid diversity learning and family support principles - designed for training early childhood practitioners to recognize and include LGBT families. The curriculum works on three levels:

1. personal growth and reflection;
2. analysis of the issues; and
3. practical applications to create change.

The information and activities in this curriculum provide a structure that college instructors, directors and trainers can use to break the cycle of exclusion and engage in work that protects the civil rights of all families. In working with our youngest children, we can interrupt the cycle of silence and discrimination that leads to bullying, violence and inequity as children grow into their elementary, teen and adult years.

Who could use this curriculum? Instructors, professors, directors and facilitators working in higher education and adult education settings, or early childhood settings, in the following areas:
Early Childhood Education
Anti-Bias Education
LGBT Studies
Anti-Oppression Education, particularly related to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

One of the goals of this curriculum is to provide support to college instructors and ECE trainers to integrate inclusion of LGBT families in all ECE courses and trainings. PSP provides support for how to do this as well as how to develop new courses focused specifically and more in depth on the work with LGBT families. Syllabi, sample agendas and training ideas are available as well as ongoing dialogue through our public forum on Making Room in the Circle.

How was this curriculum developed? This curriculum was designed, with generous support from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, based on a course that we helped develop and teach at City College of San Francisco. The 3-unit course, "Supporting LGBT Families in ECE Settings" was the first of its kind in the nation. This effort started in 2002, when Parent Services Project and other organizations joined to form the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Early Childhood Education Initiative (LGBT ECE Initiative) in the San Francisco Bay Area. The course was a project of the Initiative. Since then, Parent Services Project has replicated the course at Wheelock College in Massachusetts and is in the planning stages for replicating the course in North Carolina in the Spring of 2008. Click here for the report from Wheelock College

Are there any findings on how this curriculum impacts student learning? Philliber Research Associates, independent evaluators, assessed the results of student learning in the first two semesters of the course at San Francisco City College. Results of the evaluation informed further development of the curriculum. Their report is available here on our website. David Fernie, from Wheelock College conducted an evalution of the course at Wheelock College and the results are also available on our website.



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