Taking Students Seriously: Their rights to be safe at school

In a broader study of students' rights at school, high school students in New Zealand were asked about whether gay/lesbian/bisexual students would feel safe at their school. Data are reported from a nationwide survey of 107 high schools involving 821 students (aged 15-16 years) and 438 staff who responded to a questionnaire. The article focuses on how students and staff describe attitudes to lesbian/gay/bisexual students, and identifies the most prevalent discourses, including a counter-discourse of acceptance. Although attention to a discourse of acceptance risks the effect of undermining the implications of extreme violence against lesbian/gay/bisexual students, it also challenges the pervasive construction of lesbian/gay/bisexual students as victims. The authors argue that attention to discourses of acceptance might open up further discursive and material strategies for working towards the safety of all school students, including lesbian/gay/bisexual students.     

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.     

How Do I Understand the Term Queer? Preservice Teachers,LGBTQ Knowledge,and LGBTQ Self-Efficacy

This article describes a study that investigated preservice teachers' understandings and self-efficacy related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) students and families. The preservice teachers indicated a broad range of understandings in relation to LGBTQ terms. They reported a relatively high sense of self-efficacy in working with LGBTQ students, with slightly lower self–efficacy in identifying biases in curricular materials and school contexts and in teaching LGBTQ content in their classrooms.     

Gay–straight alliance (GSA) members’ engagement with sex education in Canadian high schools

This paper offers an examination of gay–straight alliance (GSA) members’ engagement with sex education, sexual health, and prejudice and discrimination in Canadian public high schools. It explores how five students’ (four straight and one gay-identifying) participation in GSAs served as a springboard for learning about and challenging stereotypes; prejudice; and discrimination directed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) people. Queer theory provided the theoretical underpinnings of the study, offering a lens through which to examine the heteronormative underpinnings of education, and a means to interpret how homophobic discourses circulate in school and society. Empirical data were obtained via observational notes from visits to nine GSAs and semi-structured interviews with the five GSA members. Findings suggest that straight allies can use their heterosexual privilege to address LGBTQ issues with their peers. Through GSA involvement, participants learned to interrogate and combat stereotypes about LGBTQ people and HIV-related myths, as well as to engage in queer discussion and political action.     

Gender Meanings in Grade Eight Students' Talk about Classroom Writing

This study examined the ways in which gender influences students' choices in their classroom writing. Data sources included the students' writing, small group conversations, classroom observations, and interviews with teachers. For the most part, students attempted to maintain a widely recognized gender order in their talk about girls' and boys' writing. The students' writing choices were constrained or extended by the range of discourses available to construct their gender and literate identities. The boys generally positioned themselves within powerful hegemonic masculine discourses. Some boys, however, wrote about relationships between male friends within competitive environments. Taking up the more powerful masculine discourses, some girls wrote about personal experiences playing team sports. Students made one boy aware that he had positioned himself as incompetent within the social order when he wrote about a gay character.     

Foregrounding intersectionality in rural youth’s schooling experiences in China: a queer re-reading

This article uses a queer lens in an intersectional analysis of students’ schooling experiences in rural China. I argue that a queer perspective has been largely neglected and issues related to sexuality have not been carefully investigated in Chinese educational contexts. Drawing on queer theory and an intersectional framework, I re-interpret one of my earlier qualitative studies ‘queerly’ and examine the different ways that the discourses of sexuality and gender shape rural Chinese students’ schooling lives. Findings reveal that these discourses marginalize both effeminate boys who demonstrate ‘too little’ masculinity and male ‘troublemakers’ who perform ‘too much’ masculinity. This queer route of rereading also disrupts other constructions of normalcy associated with class- and place-based identities, such as students’ ‘half-rural identity.’ The analysis shows the importance of foregrounding the intersectional dimensions of inequalities and embracing a queer theoretical framework in understanding rural education in China.     

Young Queer Artists in the Classroom

This article describes what happened when two young queer artists, Danya Defraytus and Haroon Iltaf, presented their work in a classroom context. The responses from the pupils and the teachers are also reflected upon. These responses indicate something of the potential there is for work by lesbians and gay men to be utilised in classroom contexts. The presentations had various positive outcomes for the school. For example, the teachers involved noticed that Danya and Roonie's work had useful impact on the pupils' sense of how they might develop their own, distinct creative practices on the basis of their own unique experiences and perceptions. The students made connections with Danya and Roonie, and could identify with them, in a way that transcended any differences there may have been between them in terms of their sexuality. The approach is therefore being suggested as a model for introducing work that explores lesbian and gay experiences, in a meaningful, useful and amicable way, in a classroom context. The key elements that led to the success of the work are therefore outlined to indicate ways to apply such an approach.     

Engaged or excluded: LGBTQ youth's participation in school sports and their relationship to psychological well-being

Sports participation has been shown to positively affect youth well-being. However, research has also shown that sports environments can be unsafe for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. Using data from a large study on school-related experiences of LGBTQ secondary students who reported on their extracurricular activities in school, (N = 15,813), this study examined LGBTQ youth's participation in school sports, the effects of participation on well-being and school belonging, and whether any such benefits of participation varied by transgender status and gender binary identity. Over a quarter of LGBTQ respondents in our study had participated in school sports, and being transgender and being nonbinary were related to a lower likelihood of sports participation. Transgender males and transgender nonbinary youth had the lowest likelihood of sports participation. In general, LGBTQ youth who participated in sports had increased well-being and greater school belonging. However, in regard to self-esteem, transgender nonbinary youth appeared to have greater benefit from participating in sports than did their transgender male and transgender female peers. Considering these results, schools have a responsibility to ensure that school sports are safe and welcoming for LGBTQ youth.     

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.     

Discussing Gender and Sexuality in a Context-Appropriate Way: Queer Narratives in an EFL College Classroom in Japan

This article recounts my search for a context-appropriate way of exploring gender and sexuality issues in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. The first half of the article explains why and how I sought a pedagogic strategy that would be educationally effective, institutionally viable, and culturally appropriate-in my case, for EFL students in a cultural studies course at a Christian women's college in western Japan. I sought an approach that would harmonize with the sociocultural context and with principles of effective language learning, as well as affirm the identities and rights of queer-identifying individuals but without reinforcing static sexual-identity stereotypes. The second half of the article illustrates how I used life-history narratives of local Japanese individuals to generate classroom inquiry about issues of gender and sexuality. It presents excerpts from audio-taped class discussions about the experiences of a lesbian university student (Naomi), a gay high school teacher (Kaito), and a transgender schoolmate of one of my students (Reiko). These class discussions indicate that using local queer narratives as teaching material may prove an effective way of exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and language, especially within institutional or regional contexts in which open discussion of sexuality may seem challenging or unfamiliar.     

Queer of Color Agency in Educational Contexts: Analytic Frameworks From a Queer of Color Critique

Although queer students of color face multiple obstacles to safe and full participation in numerous educational contexts, cultural and scholarly narratives that emphasize their vulnerabilities can lead educational stakeholders to overlook, and thus miss opportunities to capitalize on, the agency that these students possess to negotiate the barriers to their academic success. To counterbalance discourses on youth as at risk or in crisis, this article explores how a body of critical scholarship known as a queer of color critique can serve as a heuristic for educational research on the agentive practices of queer students of color. Situated largely outside of educational studies, a queer of color critique—much like critical race theories, disability studies, and similar discourses on difference—can organize analytic works across subfields of educational scholarship into a more coherent educational research agenda on queer of color difference while also contributing to broader critiques of homophobia, racism, and other threats to social justice in education.     

“Rocking the boat”: Developing a Shared Discourse of Resistance

The purpose of this critical ethnographic study is to provide an account from within a public school of some of the ways that heterosexist discourses and silences are reproduced and challenged. As a classroom teacher and critical ethnographer, I conducted this research with straight-identified high school students as they came to understand, problematize, and interrupt heterosexism and straight privilege. Unlike many of the students, teachers, and administrators in the school who colluded in the maintenance of heterosexism, through a critical inquiry and student-initiated activism, these students identified as allies and “rocked the boat” to challenge the discourses, silences, and invisibility that supported a heterosexist school culture.     

'Far out man?' gay and bisexual male teachers in the higher education marketplace

As part of a broader study of masculinity in higher education this paper considers the experiences of gay and bisexual male teachers. It examines the ways in which gay and bisexual men construct and manage their identities within a shifting higher education context in which 'new managerialist' discourses appear to be replacing discourses of equity. Gay and bisexual men are variously positioned in relation to the new managerialism. As men they are implicated in the masculinist tendency of market and managerialistic initiatives yet as gay/bisexual men they seem to have much to lose from the implicit political project of the market and the moral shift it signifies. The situation is further complicated in that for some gay and bisexual men new managerialism may offer progressive possibilities in its transformation of the old elitist and exclusive culture of traditional higher education. Through the analysis of in-depth interviews, the paper considers the relationship between gay and bisexual male teachers identity work and the transformative processes and practices within which they are embedded. In particular the paper attempts to understand the men's cultural stances in relation to a notion of an inclusive higher education based on democratic pluralistic values.     

The intersection of self and school: how friendship circles influence heterosexual and self-identified queer teenage New Zealand boys’ views on acceptable language and behaviour

This article discusses how the friendship circles of 38 schoolboys in New Zealand influence what they consider acceptable language and behaviour. Six focus group sessions were held with heterosexual and self-identified queer students aged between thirteen and eighteen to explore their interpretations, meanings and usage of homosexually themed language. This article starts by reviewing the intersection of adolescence and schooling as well as the importance of the friendship circle for young men. It then highlights the reported shifting in meaning concerning language, specifically the expression ‘that's so gay’. This study's heterosexual and queer participants argued that for them ‘that's so gay' has no negative social intent and is just an expression identifying that someone's action, comment or behaviour was not appropriate or right. The findings highlight the contractions and confusions that emerge when an expression with historical negative intentions is used by a younger generation.     

A queer circle of friends,indeed! The school social as intervention or as movement

The purpose of this paper to present two approaches intended to support the social lives of those typically on the borders of school life. Circles of friends (CoFs) was designed to assist students labelled with disabilities, while Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) addresses needs of supporting students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirited (gay/lesbian/bisexual First Nations people), queer and/or those questioning their sexual identity (LGBTTQQ). In laying out these approaches side by side, I argue that CoFs constitute a dis/abling pedagogy breed acquiescence, further pathologise students and create essentialised identification for all students. GSAs, in contrast, are constitutive of a queer pedagogy and promote active, agentive, healthy more complex identities. In short, CoFs are critiqued through GSAs and implications for inclusive schooling are explored.     

Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Representation in School Programs

This article explores theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for re-evaluating literary curricula and reading practices in contemporary school classrooms. Data from a study of students' responses to reading international literature in a multi-ethnic urban Canadian high school and conversations with South African high school students on their reading preferences ground this discussion of how students and teachers can cross borders constructed within discourses of race, gender, and ethnicity. Drawing on postcolonial literary theory, critical theory, and reader response theories, the article considers the questions, concerns, and dilemmas that emerge when students begin to deconstruct misrepresentations of "others" in literary texts and acknowledge challenges to their perceptions of self.     

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.     

LGBTQ student experiences in schools from 2009–2019: A systematic review of study characteristics and recommendations for prevention and intervention in school psychology journals

The present systematic review analyzes ways in which empirical studies in the field of school psychology have studied the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students in the past decade (2009–2019). Results from 23 studies revealed an over-representation of quantitative studies conducted mostly in the United States and an over-representation of majority White, cisgender, and high school participants across studies. Results also showed that studies in the last decade have: (a) focused on exploring negative attitudes and behaviors toward LGBTQ students and the outcomes of these attitudes and behaviors, (b) provided direction on how to support LGBTQ students in schools, and (c) analyzed the effects of bystanders and perpetrators on the well-being of LGBTQ students. In addition, this review revealed ways in which studies in school psychology journals present prevention and intervention practices for creating a safe environment for LGBTQ students, including: (a) policies that focus on the inclusion and protection of LGBTQ students, (b) training for faculty and other school staff to promote LGBTQ students' safety, and (c) curriculum and extracurricular activities that address LGBTQ issues. We provide recommendations for improving the experiences of LGBTQ students in schools such as involving community stakeholders in drafting affirming policies.     

Gay rights and school policy: a case study in community factors that facilitate or impede educational change

This article highlights factors that either facilitated or hampered the work of a local Safe Schools Coalition in advocating adoption and implementation of their school district’s policies that include sexual orientation. Non‐discrimination policies that include sexual orientation and gender identity are needed to help stop anti‐gay peer abuse directed at gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer/questioning students. However, community opposition to the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in school policies frequently arises from morally conservative parents. Findings of this case are compared with a model of gay rights policy adoption that illustrates strategies the local Safe Schools Coalition used to effectively communicate their message, garner support and effect change, as well as factors in the political and cultural climates of the community that either facilitated or impeded the adoption and implementation of the policies. A group of morally conservative parents opposed the policies and saw them as the school’s promotion and legitimization of homosexuality. Advocates for the policies argued they were simply intended to ‘enhance safety.’ Opponents’ claims are analyzed within a democratic and social justice framework.