Pressure Points: Intersections of Homophobia,Heterosexism, and Schooling

I examine pre-service elementary school teachers’ process of defining diversity as part of a state-mandated, high-stakes, teacher education portfolio benchmark; metaphors’ roles in their defining process; the evaluation mechanism, and the literal and metaphorical bench-mark boundary these pre-service teachers must reach to enter the profession. Using Foucault's analysis of the relation among words, things, and truth and Ogden and Richards’ definition theory as lenses, I analyze the dilemmas, ambiguities, negations, and contradictions these pre-service teachers encounter during the definition-writing process and their attempt to match their definitions of diversity to what they believe to be a concrete, absolute object, entity, or thing called diversity. Their belief that diversity is a concrete, fixed, discoverable Truth bumps against the possibility that diversity is ambiguous, negating, contradictory, and gigantic in scale. Institutionalized diversity promotes political and economic, institutional well being; discourse exposes itself as political power medium and source of subject formation. Ultimately, diversity explodes the epistemic underpinnings that lead to the expectation that one can reify diversity, wedge it “solidly in a space of visible reference points” (Foucault 1983, 17), and imprison it within institutional boundaries.