‘Queering Education’ and ‘Street Dance Activism’: A look at elite university’s course catalog

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – Harvard University is offering a swath of courses for the 2024-2025 academic year incorporating left-wing themes, ranging from “Queering Education” to “Street Dance Activism.”

The Ivy League school’s course catalog contains topics ranging from gender and sexuality to critical race theory, with some classes teaching about apparent historical instances of transgenderism and others focusing on modern policy and application of gender and race theories.

One course, titled “Queering Education,” is open to students in the education major and says it “explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping young people’s schooling experiences” and “the role of schooling experiences in shaping young people’s notions of gender and sexuality.” The course intends to focus on “the application of queer theory in school- and community-based educational settings.”

“In many ways, the course is about the ‘hidden curriculum’ of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege heterosexual, gendered identities and ways of being,” the course description reads. “As such, students in the course will apply the concept of the hidden curriculum to the study of gender and schooling.”

Students are expected to learn to “identify specific strategies” that teachers can use to discuss gender and sexuality with students, “open up possibilities for complex gender and sexual identity development” in classrooms, and “evaluate a variety of school practices, curricula, programs, and policies that seek to support healthy gender and sexual identity development for U.S. children and adolescents.”

Another course listed is titled “Queer Nation: LGBTQ+ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the United States,” where students will explore the “targeted discrimination against and widespread exclusion of queer people” in modern America.

“Any student who is interested in knowing this history and changing this world will be welcomed, affirmed, and valued in this course,” the course description states.

Several Harvard classes assert historical instances of gender ideology, such as “Global Transgender Histories,” which asks, “What are our methodological and ethical obligations to historical trans people and communities?” Another course titled “Gender in Byzantium” examines gender and sexuality in the 330–1453 CE Byzantine Empire.

In “Emancipatory Inquiry: Listening, Learning, and Acting for Social Change,” lessons are “grounded in Critical Theory, with an emphasis on feminist theory, queer theory, disability theory, Black Crit, and decolonial theory.” In a class on “Sin, Sex, and Race,” Christianity is considered in the context of “feminist and queer theory, Black studies, ethnic studies, history, trans studies, science fiction.”

“Street Dance Activism: Co-choreographic Praxis as Activism” explores the “healing modality” and “spiritual transcendence” of dance as a way to resist the “anti-Black state” and mentions the death of George Floyd as a motivator behind the course.

“It takes 28 days to change a habit, so imagine if we took 28 days to focus on our liberation,” the course description reads. “Liberation not only as a single entity, but as a global, collective consciousness. Black liberation is your liberation, and your liberation is Black liberation.”

The cost to attend Harvard for the 2024-2025 school year totals $82,866 without financial aid, according to its website. The university received $675 million in federal funding in 2023 for research, according to Harvard’s annual financial report.

Harvard did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.