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ABSTRACT: This paper describes the fundamental elements of the RSIS program design and reports on findings from the program evaluation study executed in 2008 and 2009. Data collection methods included written program evaluations (Likert-scaled and open-ended questions), semi-structured interviews of program participants, and field notes from the workshops, and data was analyzed to determine participants’ perceptions of “overall effectiveness”; “facilitator effectiveness”; and participant learning in terms of RSIS workshop objectives. It is argued that one-time RSIS professional development trainings effectively raise awareness about the stigmatization of LGBTQ students and the need to eliminate homophobic harassment, and participants are integrating program content with their existing knowledge about multicultural education and “safe schools.” Findings indicate that these meaning making systems place the “problem” of LGBTQ youths’ negative school experiences on the students, and educators envision “solutions” that will make students more tolerant of difference. Therefore, this paper concludes with reflections on the limitations of relying on these discourses to understand the systemic oppression of LGBTQ students and recommendations for helping educators recognize, critique and disrupt the ways in which schools are heteronormative institutions and deny LGBTQ youth access the same access to education as their heterosexual and gender-conforming peers.
ABSTRACT: In Fall 2009, the Reduction of Stigma in Schools (RSIS) program was approached by two Central New York elementary schools with reports that their teachers were “freaking out” over the presence of transgender children in their classrooms. They expressed high levels of fear and anxiety over the teaching of these children and fear of the community’s potential response to their providing a supportive environment for these students. RSIS is a research-based professional development program that supports educators to create affirming learning environments for LGBTQ youth (Payne & Smith, 2010) and is part of the Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI). Research and new workshop development grew out of this call. In the absence of literature on the experiences of transgender children at any grade level and the absence of the experiences of teachers in supporting transgender students, we drew heavily from work on gender enculturation in childhood and elementary schools as gendered spaces (Thorne & Luria, 2002) and gender in elementary teacher practice (Korth, 2007) to begin to explore and better understand the reactions of educators to transgender children. Educators often rely on unnamed gender assumptions to interpret their students’ activity (Korth, 2007; Skelton & Read, 2006) and classrooms reflect a cultural assumption that girls and boys are essentially and naturally different (Rands, 2009). The presence of a transgendered child makes visible some of these assumptions and, we believe, disrupts teacher identity and sense of pedagogical competence. “If gender truly has such boundaries, then [a gender non-conforming child] is…some kind of failure who needs help….” If we understand such boundaries as not true but as “a function of a normalization of power…it is the description of gender that fails [the child] and not the child who fails gender” (Boldt, 1996, p. 120). We began interviewing elementary educators on their experiences with transgender children in 2009 and data collection continues. Preliminary data were utilized to generate a professional development workshop for teachers which we began offering summer 2010. Our data and in-schools experiences indicate that educators’ initial reaction to awareness of the presence of a transgender student is fear. Words most frequently used to describe their response to the awareness of a transgender child in school included: “freak out”; “panic”; “crisis”; “fear”; “un-prepared” with the fear related descriptors appearing in all interviews. Preliminary themes that emerged in the data related to the fear included: “The other kids”; “flirting”; The “bathroom issue”; “fixing” the child/”fear” of harming the child; threat of “puberty”; gender is/as sexuality; ways of teaching/framing the world; and “community backlash.” This paper will begin to explore some of these themes. Carspecken’s (1996) critical ethnography has guided the development and execution of the study.
ABSTRACT: The lived experiences of educators who identify themselves as supportive of marginalized students or engaged in anti-oppressive work are important sites of inquiry because they offer insight to how educators are understanding the project of working toward anti-oppressive schooling and their own subject positions as advocates for marginalized students. The teachers represented here are all past participants of the Reduction of Stigma in Schools (RSIS)—a professional development program that aims to provide teachers with knowledge and tools that will empower them to create affirming environments for LGBTQ students. They were interviewed with the intended purpose of gaining their perspectives on the RSIS workshop experiences, but each teacher also told stories of their support for LGBTQ students and their reasons for engaging in this work. Interview data indicates that the role of the teacher “Ally” is being understood—by those who take it on—as a figure of care and respite. Preserving the safety and acceptance of LGBTQ students emerges from their stories as the identifying acts of the teacher “Ally”.
Part of a larger evaluative study on the Reduction of Stigma in Schools program, this paper will illustrate how participating teachers’—all White women—descriptions of their positions as Allies reflect the archetype of the “good” teacher, which mirrors the stereotypes of the “good” woman (Britzman, 1991; cited in Weber & Mitchell, 1996). In other words, the teachers represented here are upholding the cultural, gendered image of teacher as nurturing, protective, caring and capable of providing a secure environment (Weber & Mitchell, 1996 using Trousdale, 1994), despite the fact that their stories often represent risky or subversive professional behavior. Further, this paper will explore the limitations of this framework, arguing that the elimination of violence directed at LGBTQ kids and offering respite from stigma are necessary acts of care, but to narrowly define the work of supporting or affirming these students in this way is a form of depoliticization which reduces “historically induced suffering…to ‘difference’ or a medium of ‘offense’” and replaces “a justice project…with a therapeutic or behavioral one” (Brown, 2006, p. 16). The paper concludes with a vision of “Ally” that engages in the disruption of the systems of power and privilege that makes its presence necessary in the first place.
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the possibility of the genderqueer student teacher through autoethnographic reflection on the lived experience of a visibly masculine female student teacher in a music classroom and reveals the frames through which the queer body is interpreted within the (hetero)normative structures of a typical American high school. Gender queerness is examined through the relationships between normative gender and schooling, the female masculinity of a student teacher and the hegemonic masculinity of the host teacher, and the student teacher / high school student interactive dynamics with gay and heterosexually identifying high school students in a music classroom. The existence of female masculinity calls into question the natural tie of masculinity to men by making visible the possibility of masculinity without the male body (Halberstam, 1998). The education profession is often seen as feminized. Within schools, arts spaces are mythologized as places of retreat for gender non-conforming and sexual minority students. In this student teacher placement, the biologically male host teacher performed a hyper hegemonic masculinity in counter to the feminized profession and mythologized “safe” cultural space of the arts classroom. My female masculinity and queered body in this space made visible the performativity of the masculinity of the host teacher. Simultaneously, the heteronormative culture and practices of the public school renders the queer body impossible, by filtering the interpretation of the female masculinity through the male/female, heterosexual/not heterosexual binaries. My female masculinity was at once both disruptive and impossible within my location as student teacher. Drawing from autoethnographic data of journals written during the student teacher experience, directly after the student teacher experience, and later visits back to the student teaching site, I will explore the impossibility of queerness, female masculinity, and the queer student teacher in the hetero and gender normative space of school (Youdell, 2006). I will also examine how, within the confines of permissible gender expression of the male/female binary, the genderqueer teacher was understood and able to be successful and accessible to students. This paper presents the complexities of gender relationships and interactions between teachers, and between students and teachers, challenging the assumption that the teacher body is gender neutral and asexual (Braun, 2010).