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TT answers your tough questions. This time, we discuss teaching black history and honoring your and your students’ identities.

How to teach students to respectfully engage with peers of differing religious belief systems.

Many in the LGBT community love sports. Sports, though, have rarely returned the affection. Basketball star Kobe Bryant highlighted the problem when he made an anti-gay slur in a televised game last April. In sports

Religious topics have long been a touchy subject in public schools and none of them touchier than atheism. For young people though, the taboo surrounding unbelief appears to be disappearing. Recent surveys have found that younger Americans are the least likely to be religious. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 29 percent of 18-29 year olds are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 15 percent of the population as a whole. And a 2006 Pew Research poll found that 1 in 5 young people said they have no religious affiliation, nearly double the proportion of the late 1980s.

Digital gaming offers a new frontier for social justice educators.

For transgender youth, the school’s bathroom can be a dangerous place. School administrators must set policies now allowing for students to use the facilities to match their gender identities.

Twenty-eight teachers in my master’s level class silently moved en masse to the right side of the room to signify that they would teach the civil rights movement to their elementary students. In fact, most considered it negligent to ignore this historic movement that brought about the end of segregation in our country.

One reason there are so many incidences of anti-gay bullying is a simple lack of understanding. Introducing kids to LGBT topics at an early age, in a comfortable and open environment, rather than allowing them to discover the subject at a later age where they may also pick up prejudicial and inaccurate information can help prevent such violence. This approach can also help LGBT children–or those with LGBT family members—feel safer and more accepted within the classroom.