David Giovagnoli wants to help cultivate a community of allies at Illinois State University. Giovagnoli facilitates both Safe Zone and the Queer Allyship Learning Community, which aim to provide education, support, and resources on campus. He was recently named a 2022-2023 Donald H. Wulff Diversity Fellow for the POD Network, an international organization for educational developers.
“It’s not about making safe spaces per se, it’s about giving folks at Illinois State University the tools they need to make our whole campus more affirming,” said Giovagnoli, a Center for Integrated Professional Development coordinator and advanced English doctoral student.
During LGBTQ+ History Month, he stresses the important role faculty, staff, and graduate students can play to be effective LGBTQ+ allies.
“The idea of Safe Zone, as a training and workshop, is to give folks a basic understanding of what coming out means, what gender confirmation and transition means, and thinking about why it’s important to consider how pronouns are used in your classroom,” Giovagnoli said. “There’s not a single correct answer in every situation, so we talk about different strategies. It’s meant to create classrooms where instructors understand LGBTQ+ issues and are doing things to support their students.”
Safe Zone is a two-and-a-half-hour introductory workshop, while the Queer Allyship Learning Community is an ongoing application-level group in which faculty and staff document what they do in their classrooms and other campus spaces while increasing their knowledge of evidence-based practices.
“The Queer Allyship Learning Community is about figuring out what allyship looks like on campus and what it could look like, and seeing how folks may use that differently in their diverse campus roles,” Giovagnoli said.
The learning community involves monthly discussions and reading books such as Affirming LGBTQ+ Students in Higher Education, which is available at Milner Library. Giovagnoli said the book is an important read because it talks about allyship at different levels including the classroom, curriculum, and policy.
“Allyship is not just being tolerant or allowing someone to exist. Allyship is taking active steps to advocate for affirmation and change.”
David Giovagnoli
“This is meant to open up those conversations and bring more voices, because at the Center, we do an umbrella of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programming, like Mayuko Nakamura’s Foundations of Equity and Inclusion Series, and we’re also trying to expand into programming that focuses on the specific needs of individual populations. Safe Zone and our new partnership with Student Access and Accommodation Services on a workshop about neurodiversity are two examples of that,” said Giovagnoli.
His goal is for participants to think both about intersectionality (how identities are informed by multiple categories, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality) and about how individual identity categories influence our experiences.
“Allyship is not just being tolerant or allowing someone to exist. Allyship is taking active steps to advocate for affirmation and change,” Giovagnoli said. “One of the things we agreed on during our first meeting of the learning community was that we don’t just want to learn about these issues, we want to translate that learning into action. What those actions will look like is different for everyone in that group, but we’re also considering what we can do as a group together.”
Though the Queer Allyship Learning Community is still in its early stages, Giovagnoli received support from Dr. Jennifer Frieberg, the Center’s director, along with institutional support for resources.
Giovagnoli used the Safe Zone Project’s official website to help design the curriculum for Safe Zone, and the Queer Allyship learning community emerged from that design process.
“(Safe Zone) has been helpful for faculty as an intro to terminology,” he said. “If you don’t know the terminology, it’s hard to be an ally and hard to understand why we would need allyship in the classroom without a base level of knowledge.”
Due to positive responses from the Safe Zone workshops, Giovagnoli said participants wanted to dive deeper into the learning materials, so this fall, he expanded to facilitating the Queer Allyship Learning Community.
“We need as much allyship in all different facets as we can on campus, and belongingness and relationship building have been two of our strong themes at the Center, which is also the theme of the Teaching and Learning Symposium in January 2023,” he said.
Giovagnoli has already partnered with individual departments like Thomas Metcalf School, Woonsook Kim School of Art, the School of Music, and Enrollment Management and Academic Services. From his experience, he said faculty, staff, and graduate students are choosing to attend the sessions because they want to continue to learn how to make their classrooms a safe and supported learning environment for their students.
Giovagnoli said he plans to use the Center’s website as a resource in the future and wants to partner with other identity groups and lab schools on campus to offer more learning opportunities.
“The best part about this is giving back and being able to make this a safer and better place for queer students, especially in terms of getting faculty to think beyond using the right pronouns and names—and thinking, ‘What things can’t I see in my class that are impacting my students?’” he said. “That’s been the most rewarding part of the work I do—seeing people grow and meet their goals.”
