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In recent years, media coverage of LGBTQ bullying and its consequences raised public recognition of the need for schools to “act” in support of these students. However, the complex relations of power in which education is situated (Apple, 1996) make this no simple task. Presence/absence of administrator and school board support, state and local policy, lack of Queer identities in curriculum, community values, stigmatization of LGBTQ identities, and tension between educators’ sense of professional responsibility and concern for job security make it unclear how education professionals should engage in the risky work of supporting LGBTQ students. Using critical qualitative methodologies (Carspecken, 1996), this session aims to explore this dilemma by examining the teaching of LGBTQ students in four distinct contexts. Each paper will both provide detailed description of educators’ experiences as they navigated the intense stigmatization of LGBTQ identities in schools and analyze how teachers’ possibilities for engagement with LGBTQ students are shaped by heteronormativity and discourses of “good teaching” or “teacher professionalism” (Bower & Klecka, 2009; Curran et al, 2009).
Each paper reflects projects completed in association with the Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI) between 2009 and 2012. QuERI aims to bridge the gap between research and practice in creating supportive educational environments for LGBTQ youth. All QuERI research and applied work utilizes a critical theoretical and methodological approach (Carspecken, 1996) that acknowledges that LGBTQ students are marginalized in the school environment in multiple ways and that the teachers who support them negotiate the same systems of marginalization. These four papers address the issue of educator engagement with this work through the experiences of: (1) heterosexual female teachers who identify as “teacher allies;” (2) elementary educators of transgender students; (3) art educators who used democratic pedagogical principles to bring the lived experience LGBTQ students into the curriculum; (4) and a genderqueer student-teacher navigating the complexities of her own visibility in her support for LGBTQ students. By synthesizing these four projects, it becomes possible to pursue a more in-depth understanding of how heteronormative systems not only stigmatize and marginalize LGBTQ identities, but also place constant pressure on educators to minimize the visibility of pro-LGBTQ work—despite public pressure to keep these students “safe.”
This session makes a significant contribution to education research through challenging the dominant narrative of teachers’ responsibility to “safety” for LGBTQ students. The “safety” and hegemonic bullying discourses are closely intertwined (Ringrose & Renold, 2010) and imply that “fixing” LGBTQ harassment and/or marginalization is simply a matter of teacher attentiveness to homophobic acts. This panel illustrates that this is an over-simplified framework, reducing the role of the student to victim and teacher to protector—effectively erasing learning or any other form of inter-personal engagement from the teacher/student dynamic, and discounting the systemic marginality of queer identities in schools. This panel explores the multiple ways educator’ actions are restrained, locates possibilities for transgressing or subverting the regulative power of these structures, and identifies strategies for supporting LGBTQ youth that stretch beyond the worldview of protective frameworks.
Students in the positions of sexual and gendered otherness within schools are “stigmatized” as objects for ridicule and avoidance not only through ritualized name-calling and gendered harassment (Smith, 1998), but also through the “pervasive heteronormative discourse and symbols of appropriate gender and sexual relations displayed through classrooms, peer groups, and extracurricular activities” (Wilkinson & Pearson, 2009, p. 543). Supporting the marginalized carries risk of “stigma by association” (Neuberg, Smith, Hoffman, & Russell, 1994) and avoiding the taint of sexual and gendered otherness requires careful positioning. In the papers presented here, we explore the expressions- through art- of the continued marginalization of LGBTQ youth and we look at teacher performance of “professional responsibility” to LGBTQ students with an eye toward avoiding stigma by association through adherence to their own gender normativity and through a discourse of sensitivity to community “values.”
As part of the Arts in Action initiative through The Queering Education Research Institute, researchers for this project spent three months in high school Gay Straight Alliances and Acceptance Coalitions throughout the Syracuse, NY area exploring student visual representation of their LGBTQ/A identities. Students were asked to respond artistically to prompts exploring issues of power, agency, and representation in the high school setting and to engage the relationship between image and text to create a painting or mixed media piece reflecting how they see themselves as a LGBTQ or A student. The resulting artwork/ identity work from the students demonstrated a struggle for agency through the re-appropriation of popular imagery and text illustrating their perspectives on their own marginalization within high schools. The representations evidenced how students position themselves, are positioned by others, and negotiated their identities in and out of school employing imagery that addressed fear, judgment, loneliness, isolation and escapism and expressing how those feelings influenced and infiltrated their daily school experience. There were also images of an imagined and hopeful future where the pain of social stigma had been lifted and students were “freed” from the weight of a marked identity. Through making their private imaginary public and translating their lived experience as an LGBTQ/A student to canvas, students were able to give the viewer access to the their “internal voice”- the way that “students order and understand their reality”- and make that voice “external”, providing a “vehicle” (Hanley, 2010) for bringing their ideas/experiences/interpretations of their marked positions in school into the open for exchange and into dialogue on the continued marginalization of LGBTQ in school spaces.
Despite the pervasive celebration in early childhood and elementary classroom activities of heteronormative rituals such as man-to-woman marriage, gendered play centers (i.e. kitchen area versus the building block corner), and stories of princesses awaiting princely kisses, elementary teachers often reject that they engage with issues of sexuality (Allan et al, 2008; DePalma & Atkinson, 2009; Surtees, 2005). In keeping with the notion of childhood as innocent and asexual, they assert that it is “not their role” to address these topics (Surtees, 2005). Discussing gender, sex and sexuality can be professionally risky for teachers in any educational space, but it is especially so at the elementary level (DePalma & Atkinson, 2009), where the silence around the “forbidden subject of sexualities” (Allan et al, 2008, p. 322) is a “powerful force” (DePalma & Atkinson, 2009, p. 8). LGBTQ identities and experiences are particularly taboo in this environment where “the hyper-sexualization of gay and lesbian sexualities clashes strongly with [the] widespread myth in primary schools of the asexual and naïve child” (De Palma & Jennett, 2010, p. 19). Here, “the implicit conceptual links between sexual orientation and sexual activity “ (De Palma & Jennett, 2010, p. 19) and LGB sexual orientation and gender transgression (De Palma & Jennett, 2010; Youdell, 2009) have led teachers to avoid addressing these topics altogether (De Palma & Jennett, 2010). Additionally, “the discourse of recruitment to a gay lifestyle and the alignment of teaching about [LGBTQ] people as being about teaching gay sex or pedophilia” (Curran et al, 2009, p. 165) puts teachers who choose to visibly support gender and sexual diversity at high risk for having their own character and intentions questioned (Youdell, 2009). The increased visibility and early transitioning of transgender children requires elementary school professionals to take on issues of gender diversity and by association, sex and sexuality within elementary school spaces. For this study, school professionals who have worked with transgender children were interviewed about their experience with transgender students. Findings indicate that fear and anxiety are the most common educator responses to the presence of a transgender child with a great deal of fear expressed around the possibility for “community backlash” and accusations of “promoting” or “accepting” transgender identities and non-normative sexualities. This fear of “stigma by association” limits the possibilities for schools to act to affirm transgender identity and focuses attention on containing the child, rather than supporting the child.
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 the risk to their own subject positions in relation to 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 which reduces the potential taint of stigma by association with LGBTQ people and confirms the teacher’s normatively gendered position as “good woman”. 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, normatively gendered image of teacher as nurturing, protective, caring and capable of providing a secure environment (Weber & Mitchell, 1996 using Trousdale, 1994) and thus not “challenging” the heteronormative structure that privileges gender and sexuality conformity and avoiding “stigma by association” through a culturally recognized iteration of the moral and upstanding “good” -heterosexual/normatively gendered – woman.