Don Romesburg Prize
THE DEADLINE FOR ENTRY HAS PASSED. THE NEXT ROUND WILL OPEN IN SUMMER 2026
The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History (CLGBTH) will award the Don Romesburg Prize for outstanding K-12 curriculum in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer history created in 2023 or 2024. The Prize is underwritten by the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, CA.
Submissions should be sent as one PDF file via email by 11:59pm (Pacific time), 1 November 2024 to all members of the prize committee.
Prize Committee:
- Stacie Brensilver Berman, New York University, smb278@nyu.edu
- Wendy Rouse, San Jose State University,Wendy.Rouse@sjsu.edu
- David Duffield, Colorado LGBTQ History Project, dduffield@lgbtqcolorado.org
Don Romesburg is a former co-chair of the CLGBTH and the lead author of the groundbreaking report, Making the Framework FAIR: California’s History-Social Science Framework Proposed LGBT Revisions Related to the FAIR Education Act, which he wrote about for Perspectives in 2016. We are thrilled to honor and to extend his work to bring intersectional and research-driven LGBT history content to K-12 students. The prize will be awarded in consecutive odd-numbered years, covering the previous two years. It is open to K-12 educators in all content areas and educational institutions. We will share the winning curriculum on our website and through our networks with the hope of encouraging teachers around the nation to adapt the content to meet their own objectives, standards, and student needs.
2025
Winner: Elizabeth Bergman of Wildwood School in Los Angeles for her lesson on the Newport Scandal.
The title of Elizabeth’s lesson is “The Newport Scandal (1919).” The lesson introduces students to that scandal, in which soldiers were targeted, arrested, and discharged for engaging in relationships with other men and investigates military officials’ and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s tactics and roles in pursuing those convictions. We selected Elizabeth’s lesson for a few reasons. We thought it was useful for teachers and students and aligned well with standards–especially those related to teaching about the aftermath of WWI and the first Red Scare. We appreciated the lesson’s emphasis on primary sources and the well-structured way that students interact with the sources and with each other through the use of a jigsaw tactic. We also appreciated that the lesson focuses on a topic that has deep connections to other topics in US history but is not often discussed in classes at the moment. This lesson models using all of the strategies and tools that social studies teachers use in lessons about topics across the curriculum, demonstrating that the ways that we teach LGBTQ+ history are the same as the practices we use in general.
2023
Winner: Olive Garrison, “Queer lives during the Great Depression”
Olive Garrison’s lessons weave LGBTQ+ experiences into topics and eras often taught in the US history curriculum. In doing so, they not only ask students to consider a more complete and comprehensive picture of the time periods they cover, but they also focus on people’s day-to-day lived experiences in time periods that can seem removed from students’ twenty-first-century lives. In particular, Garrison’s lesson, “Ordinary Queers with Extraordinary Stories in the 1930s,” prompts students to consider the ways in which the Great Depression affected queer Americans and how the structures and movement of the time period changed people’s lives. Lessons on queer individuals’ experiences in WWII and gender roles during the Gilded Age similarly offer students opportunities to consider history from new, more representative, perspectives.
2019
Winner: Emily Richards and Rachel Reinhard submitted a clearly contextualized and standards-aligned lesson that integrated the history of the Lavender Scare with the Red Scare. This lesson is intended for use in 11th grade classrooms. National and State content standards require high school United States history teachers to discuss the impacts of McCarthyism and the Cold War at home. This lesson’s focus on the Lavender Scare as an extension of larger Cold War fears allows educators to clearly see its significance and connection to their existing curriculum. In addition, this lesson’s emphasis on close reading, analysis of primary sources, and weighing and corroborating evidence aligns it squarely with state and national Common Core literacy and inquiry standards. The lesson is especially laudable for explicitly centering the historical analysis on the short-term and long-term impacts of the Cold War era on the LGBT community.
Runner-up: Bretton A. Varga’s lesson plan submission focused on the life and historical significance of Harvey Milk. The prize committee found this lesson impressive not only for its LGBTQ content but for its use of biography as a teaching tool and its innovative integration of educational technology tools (KidCitizen). Overall, the lesson is creative and engaging for use in an elementary school classroom.