Queer trepidations and the art of inclusion

Abstract

Contemporary research and pedagogy telated to sexualities and schooling in Australia, Aotearoa1/New Zealand and the United States often focuses on ways to alleviate homophobia and heterosexism in the hope of creating schools that are more inclusive of lesbian and gay (and very rarely bisexual, transgender and intersex2) (LGBTI) teachers and students. Within this paradigm, the notion of what comprises sexualities is often taken as given. Alternatively, researchers and educators may invoke essentialising narratives in order to make arguments for the inclusion of students and teachers who adopt LGBTI identifications. Drawing on a theoretical framework influenced by the work of Deborah Britzman3 and other queer theorists within and outside education this article interrogates these strategies of inclusion. In particular, I focus on research methodologies and pedagogies related to sexualities and schooling devised in the name of inclusion of young people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT)4 in secondary educational contexts. This analysis, which is based on my doctoral studies, commences with a consideration of queer theories and the art of inclusion. Subsequent to this I analyse pedagogies of inclusion and methodologies of inclusion, and, their nexus with queer theories.     

Growth of Reflection in Teaching: Reconciling the Models

Although all teachers are expected to be “role models,” discursive trajectories reaching back to the West’s gay liberation pressure queer teachers to be role models in specific ways – by “coming out” and helping queer students out of their “time of difficulty.” Paradoxically, discourses that construct children as innocent and queers‐as‐a‐threat make it difficult for queer teachers not only to take up these positions as role models but to be visible in schools. In this article, I explore the discourses that shape queer teachers’ understanding of touch, sexuality, confidentiality, the private versus public domain, and pedagogical responsibility within the schooling context. Informed by Foucault, I analyze the interview data of three Ontario queer teachers to investigate the ways in which queers‐as‐a‐threat and teacher‐as‐role‐model influence the negotiation of their ethical dilemmas regarding their student crushes.     

Asking queer(er) questions: epistemological and methodological implications for qualitative inquirers

This collection of distinct scholarly essays deliberatively turns to queer experience and theorizing as a resource for constructing vibrant qualitative research designs. Queer theory offers a breadth of epistemological and methodological possibilities for qualitative projects that are too frequently overlooked for many reasons. These reasons include frequently strict association of queer theory with queer research topics and researchers, as well as a concurrent reluctance to interrogate the representational needs of heterosexist culture served by the metaphor of the ‘closet.’ Queer theory also compels inquiry that takes up the unique circumstances of queer subjects. Locating educational inquiry within globally complex socio-historical dynamics and a post-Obergefell/post-2016 election U.S. context, this article poses multiple trajectories through which various scholars explore queer(er) qualitative inquiry in educational studies. These perspectives invite researchers to rethink qualitative inquiry designs through engagement with the queer, inclusive of research topics not initially perceived to be queer.     

Queer pedagogy,educational practice and lesbian and gay youth

Our article explores the potential that queer paradigms and pedagogies hold for affirming sexual diversity in secondary schools. In understanding the operation of schools as heteronormalising institutions, it is possible to move beyond viewing queer youth as a disenfranchised minority group requiring reparation within an equity framework (a process that we suggest operates simultaneously to legitimate heterosexuality and to reinforce the abnormality of same-sex desire). Using research that we have undertaken with lesbian and gay youth in New Zealand secondary schools, and drawing on queer, post modern and feminist theoretical threads, we explore three (hetero) normalising processes experienced by the queer participants in their schools; the maintenance of silences, the pathologisation of (homo)sexualities, and the policing of gender boundaries. We close by exploring how several queer pedagogical features - creating venues, abnormalising the normal, dissolving the homo/hetero binary and forming alliances - could be used in order to affirm the sexual diversity of secondary school students.     

“Struck by the Way Our Bodies Conveyed So Much:” A Collaborative Self-Study of our Developing Understanding of Embodied Pedagogies

Embodied pedagogies offer methodological and pedagogical possibilities for exploring and understanding the emotional and embodied dimensions of teaching and learning to teach. In this paper we present a collaborative self-study that examines what we have learned about the nature, value and facilitation of embodied pedagogies through our experiences as both facilitators and participants. Through engaging in this self-study we have deepened our understanding of three aspects of embodied pedagogies: the nature of embodiment as a process of learning and coming to know, the challenges associated with engaging learners in embodied pedagogies, and some of the factors that contribute to skilful facilitation of embodied pedagogies. Articulating these understandings offers insight for ourselves and for other teacher educators looking to engage preservice teachers in embodied explorations and understandings of teaching and learning.     

Coming out,rolling over,and playing model: possibilities beyond the trope of queer students “at-risk”

In this article, I explore one lesbian teacher’s ethical dilemmas and resulting disappointment related to the lack of participation by queer students in the Gay Straight Alliance she helped to create. Her dilemmas hinge on the paradoxical subject position of queer teacher in tension with the “coming out imperative” and intersecting with discursive articulations of teacher-as-role model and queer students as a population “at-risk.” Grounded in scholarship that describes the discursive production of queer teacher and queer students, I explore the ways in which one group of queer students resist notions of “at-riskness” and the resulting impact on their teacher.     

Community as Resistance: Reconceptualizing Historical Instances of Community within Latin@ Education

The term “community” is drawn upon within critical educational literature that seeks to address inequity experienced by students of color in schools, yet little explicit discussion of its meaning and history is presented. In this article, I offer one way of thinking about community. I propose that it has existed as resistance within the context of Latin@ education between the turn of the twentieth century through the latter part. Using a critical human geography lens, I argue that this history holds importance because spaces are (re)productions of past spaces. This offers possibilities for informing and inspiring present-day critical pedagogies.     

Towards ‘refiguring presences’ as an anti-colonial orientation to research in early childhood studies

In this paper, I craft a methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings with particular attention to settler colonialism and more-than-human entanglements. Drawing from my work with children and educators in childcare settings located in what is now British Columbia, Canada, I use refiguring presences to describe this research methodology, and its particular attention to unsettling everyday place relations in early childhood pedagogies within the context of settler colonialism. I situate refiguring presences in everyday material-discursive impacts in an effort to open up the potentialities and boundaries of political engagement in early childhood studies. I experiment with refiguring presences in relation to what I see as its most important elements. These elements include attending to colonialisms in everyday encounters, restorying contested places, foregrounding more-than-human relationalities and (dis)entangling researcher subjectivities.     

PUSHING THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM: QUEERNESS, CHILDREN, AND THE FUTURE

A bstract .  In this essay, Cris Mayo describes a tension between recognizing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people by law and giving (or denying) them certain legal rights on the basis of identity, on the one hand, and enabling queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, to live their potentials, on the other. Laws and rights regulate particular kinds of people, and while lgbt people have pursued civil rights energetically for the last sixty years or so, their queerness continues to complicate their attempts to gain legitimacy. Beyond civil rights claims, queer liberationist claims push the limits of the understanding of identity, sexual practices, and political life, because they prompt us to consider not just abstract possibilities and freedoms but the freedoms and possibilities of people barely recognizable. Mayo shows how these queer claims are often hard to frame in terms of liberal theory and actual law.     

Writing the queer self: Using autobiography to mediate inclusive teacher education in Canada

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiated in my university's teacher education programme to explore sex, sexual and gender differences in education and culture. I explore how I link my queer autobiography to the professional and the pedagogical, and how I use it to engender deliberations about queer presence, representation and place in education. I conclude by speaking on the importance of doing this work as an ethical project for social justice and educational transformation.     

Working Alterity: The Impossibility of Ethical Research With Youth

In this article, my goals are to speak theoretically and methodologically about researching with, for, and about queer youth in ways that trouble identities as people represent them. I do so within examinations of (hetero)normativity and exploring the promise of queering qualitative methodologies. Opening with a brief contextualization of the ethical conundrums inherent in a qualitative research methodology, I am particularly interested in methodologies that emanate from epistemologies that attempt both to be ethical, and to acknowledge the very impossibility of such a move. Next, possibilities for data collection, analysis, and representation that are particularly important when working with queer youth are outlined. Last, I engage in the difficult conversation about who ought be engaging in research with, by, and for queer youth.     

Tronto's notion of privileged irresponsibility and the reconceptualisation of care: implications for critical pedagogies of emotion in higher education

This article takes on some of care theorist Joan Tronto's ideas on care and responsibility and asks what implications they have for critical pedagogies in higher education. The authors argue that Tronto's political ethics of care framework enriches the transformative potential of critical pedagogies, because it helps expose how power and emotion operate through (ir)responsibility. In particular, Tronto's notion of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ is analysed in relation to the gendered and emotional ideologies and practices that are constructed discursively and materially. It is argued that critical pedagogies of emotion grounded in Tronto's political ethics of care provide the concepts and openings to critically explore the emotions arising from failing to recognise different teachers' and students' needs and from engaging in practices of privileged irresponsibility. Also, critical pedagogies of emotion encourage students and educators to be attentive to their own emotional positions and practices with regard to caring responsibilities and (gendered and other) privileged irresponsibilities.     

The experience of learning to teach: Changing student teachers' ways of understanding teaching

I examine how physical education teachers respond to homophobic name‐calling, as revealed in life history interviews with ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, and ‘heterosexual’ teachers in Canada and the USA. Censoring homophobic name‐calling in schools is discussed as an important, but insufficient, response. Several ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ teachers responded with pedagogies of injury; that is, they recalled their personal experiences of homophobic language to teach students not to use words such as ‘fag’, ‘dyke’, and ‘queer’. I examine why some teachers were prepared to risk further personal injury in order to prevent injury to other students. In addition to rational and conscious explanations, I speculate that an unconscious masochistic imperative may also animate this approach to anti‐homophobic education. Ultimately, I ask what is demanded from teachers if this type of anti‐homophobic teaching is animated by what has been called an attachment to subjection.     

Not writing,and giving ‘zero-f**ks’ about it: queer(y)ing doctoral ‘failure’

This article proposes that a queer reading of failure might offer opportunities to re-think the affective-political practice of doctoral writing. It examines data from one case in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how a doctoral student negotiates ‘failure’ in relation to their writing practice and identity. While higher education researchers have tended to interpret failure as something to avoid, or learn from in the pursuit of normative success, queer research offers us new pathways into analysis. In this article, I argue that we can recognize ‘writing failures’ as possible modes of being and becoming doctoral. Despite being frequently associated with affective practices of guilt, shame, and disappointment, failure might also open onto alternative feelings such as relief, joy, and satisfaction. Ultimately, the article contends that queer concepts might assist higher education researchers to interrogate normative framings of failure, and to glimpse alternative possibilities for understanding ‘success’.     

Students’ perceptions of written feedback in teacher education: ideally feedback is a continuing two-way communication that encourages progress

A small but growing body of research has investigated students’ perceptions of written feedback in higher education but little attention has been brought to bear on students’ emotional responses to feedback. This paper investigates students’ perceptions of written feedback with particular emphasis on their emotional responses within a teacher education programme in a regional Australian university. Online questionnaires were used to gather qualitative data from cohorts of distance students and on-campus students. The study found that students’ emotions strongly mediated their perceptions of written feedback. The paper concludes that in order to accommodate students’ emotional responses, effective written feedback should be aligned with pedagogies which specifically include the development of rich dialogue within the teaching and learning context.     

Futurising science education: students’ experiences from a course on futures thinking and quantum computing

To promote students’ value-based agency, responsible science and sustainability, science education must address how students think about their personal and collective futures. However, research has shown that young people find it difficult to fully relate to the future and its possibilities, and few studies have focused on the potential of science education to foster futures thinking and agency. We report on a project that further explored this potential by developing future-oriented science courses drawing on the field of futures studies. Phenomenographic analysis was used on interview data to see what changes upper-secondary school students saw in their futures perceptions and agentic orientations after attending a course which adapted futures thinking skills in the context of quantum computing and technological approaches to global problems. The results show students perceiving the future and technological development as more positive but also more unpredictable, seeing their possibilities for agency as clearer and more promising (especially by identifying with their peers or aspired career paths), and feeling a deeper connection to the otherwise vague idea of futures. Students also felt they had learned to question deterministic thinking and to think more creatively about their own lives as well as technological and non-technological solutions to global problems. Both quantum physics and futures thinking opened new perspectives on uncertainty and probabilistic thinking. Our results provide further validation for a future-oriented approach to science education, and highlight essential synergies between futures thinking skills, agency, and authentic socio-scientific issues in developing science education for the current age.

     

Pedagogies for the ‘Dis‐engaged’: Diverse Experiences of the Young People’s Arts Award Programme

Art education is often praised for its engaging programmes and inclusive pedagogies, with many initiatives created with the intention of widening access for those who are deemed to be lacking. This article investigates one such programme – the young people’s Arts Award, which is a nationally recognised qualification for young people aged 11–25. I call upon a range of pedagogies in order to critique the Arts Award within the context of informal and alternative education settings in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a 12‐month ethnographic study, the research was conducted across five diverse programmes which included youth work projects and alternative provision. I present two cases – ‘learning to be an artist’ and ‘learning to behave’ – which demonstrate a hierarchy of pedagogy in the application of this programme across these particular contexts. Artists’ Signature Pedagogies are used as an analytical framework to explore the affordances of working with artists through the programme. Further, I engage with the Pedagogy of Poverty to demonstrate that young people who were classified as ‘dis‐engaged’ were more likely to receive lower quality programmes, low‐level work and over‐regulated teaching. I argue that despite changes to the ways that young people access art education, there continues to be unequal opportunities. This finding is significant for not only creative practitioners and youth arts workers, but also arts education policy makers and programmers.     

Rooted in resistance: women teachers constructing counter‐pedagogies in post‐authoritarian Brazil

This study focuses upon the narratives of women educators (educadoras) who contributed to radical democratic school reforms in post‐authoritarian Brazil. We illustrate through three of the teachers’ narratives how their professional identities and actions were shaped partly by their experiences of resisting the military regime and by their participation in professional development opportunities that grew from liberatory social movements. Our analysis focuses on their efforts to construct counter‐pedagogies in their disciplines of history, mathematics, and physical education that resisted colonizing, authoritative practices and moved toward more liberatory, humanizing pedagogies. We consider how these counter‐pedagogies reflect both women’s ways of knowing that emphasize dialogue, collaboration, community, and the value of personal knowledge and relationships, as well as feminist principles of consciousness‐raising and social action. This analysis highlights possibilities and challenges of radical democratic reform in education by focusing on the work, experience, and identities of women educators engaged in the day‐to‐day efforts to bring about lasting change.     

“I’m Glad I was Designed”: Un/Doing Gender and Class in Susan Price’s “Odin Trilogy”

Susan Price’s “Odin Trilogy” (2005–2008) is a juvenile science fiction series that depicts a future where class relations have become polarised due to late capitalist and technological developments and where ways of doing gender continue to be strongly connected with class. The society in the novels is based on slavery: people are either Freewomen/Freemen or bonders. Here wealth and genetic engineering regulate normative ways of doing gender and class and define borders between humanity and inhumanity. By drawing on recent feminist theory and queer theorisations of Butler (2004) and Halberstam (2005), I will examine gender and class as both material and performative aspects of identity that are “un/done” in relation to heteronormative life trajectories. I focus on the two female protagonists and their classic role reversal: one escapes slavery while the other is forced to become a bonder. The classic scenario becomes more complicated when the girls escape together to Mars and start a new life there as a queer couple. The girls’ “queer life trajectories” (Halberstam) challenge normative ways of doing gender and class and open up possibilities for reading Price’s trilogy as a critique of neoliberalist and postfeminist discourses of gender, class, identity and choice.     

Homotolerance and heteronormativity in Norwegian classrooms

This article is based on classroom observations and discusses sexual education that addresses homosexuality. Tolerance of queer lifestyles as well as support for judicial equality between heterosexual and homosexual couples is generally perceived as being high in the Norwegian political context. Norwegian sexual politics is, however, based on a binary understanding of sexuality, linked to stable and authentic sexual identities, and this perspective is highly influential in Norwegian education on sexuality. Homotolerance appears to be the most prominent ambition when teachers deal with homosexuality in their teaching. Informed by queer theory, I intend to investigate how teaching that sets out to create homotolerance reproduces heteronormativity. I will argue that even though education on homosexuality may create increased homotolerance, the very same education does also marginalise and stigmatise homosexuality as well as reproduce binary and heteronormative concepts of sexuality.