Publications

Community Engagement Publications

Dr. Elizabethe Payne began writing for Huffington Post in the summer of 2012 as an authority on LGBT bullying. QuERI Research Fellow, Dr. Melissa Smith, often writes with her. As other streams of QuERI research advance toward publication, the graduate student research assistants working with those studies will have opportunities to write with Dr. Payne on Huffington Post. Huffington Post provides a venue for increased accessibility to QuERI research and supports our mission of using research to facilitate change for LGBTQ students. Their blogs can be found here.

Research Publications

Many QuERI conference and published papers can be accessed here: https://queeringeducation.academia.ed/ElizabethePayne/Papers

Payne, E., & Smith, M. (2018). Refusing relevance: School administrator resistanceto offering professional development addressing LGBTQ issues in schools. Education Administration Quarterly, 54(2), 183-215.

Payne, E., & Smith, M. (2018). Violence against LGBTQ students: Punishing and marginalizing difference. In Shapiro, H. (Ed.), Handbook on Violence in Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions. (pp. 393-416). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Payne, E., & Smith, M. (2017). The Reduction of Stigma in Schools: A new professional development model for empowering educators to support LGBTQ students. In Aggleton, P. (Ed.), Education and Sexualities: Major Themes in Education. Routledge.

Fields, J., & Payne, E. (2016) Gender and sexuality: Taking up space in schooling. Sex Education, 16:1, 1-7.

Payne, E., & Fields, J. (2016). Co-editors. Special Edition. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Everyday Spaces of Schooling. Journal of Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 16:1.

Payne, E. & Smith, M. (2016). Gender Policing. In N. Rodriguez, J. Ingrey, W. Martino, & E. Brockenbrough (Eds.)  Queer Studies and Education: Critical Concepts for the Twenty-First Century. (pp. 127-136). New York: Palgrave McMillan.

Smith, M. & Payne, E. (2016). Educator evaluations of school climate for LGBTQ students: A reiteration of the bullying discourse. In V.E. Bloomfield & M.E. Fisher (Eds.), Voices of LGBTQ Students and Teachers: Changing the Culture of Schooling. (pp. 73-86). New York: Routledge.

ABSTRACT: This chapter explores educators’ evaluations of school climate for LGBTQ youth.  Analysis examines the limitations of their dependence on the “bullying” and “climate” discourses to frame LGBTQ student experiences of school and to access available educator and school responses.   Conclusions assert that these discourses serve as barriers to envisioning more equitable learning environments for students.

Payne, E. & Smith, M. (2016). Violence and Victimization of Youth. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Smith, M. & Payne, E. (2016). School Professionals’ Responses to LGBTQ Training. In A. Goldberg (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies. Ed. A. Goldberg.

Smith, M. & Payne, E. (2016). Binaries and Biology:
Conversations with Elementary Education Professionals after Professional
 Development on Supporting Transgender Students. The Educational Forum, 8o(1), 34-47.

ABSTRACT: Schools are gendered cultural sites that leave little room for gender transgressions, let alone affirmation of a transgender child. This paper examines how U.S. educators make meaning of teaching transgender students after attending professional development about transgender identity. Participants resisted gender-affirming pedagogy and fixated on the logistics of accommodating transgender students and keeping them safe. It will be argued that educators’ failure to make gender-inclusive structural changes is indicative of this interpretation of educator responsibility. 

Payne, E. (2015). Resisting the taint, Marking the slut: Middle class lesbian girls and claims to sexual propriety. In E. Renold, J. Ringrose, & R. D. Egan (Eds.), Children, Sexuality and the Sexualisation of Culture. (pp. 224-238). Palgrave, UK.

ABSTRACT: The “good girl is a beacon of morality because of her adherence to the standards of White propriety” which privilege middle class values of monogamy, abstinence (Brown, 2012, p. 162) and an orientation toward the future. While middle class White straight girls “hold the ideological space of sexual containment,” lesbian girls hold the “ideological space of sexual contamination” (McClelland & Fine, 2008, p.92). To be named “lesbian” is to be sexualized in your identity – to be publicly tied to sex acts deemed “deviant” (Ussher & Mooney-Somers, 2000, p. 183). “Lesbian” and “good girl” are discursively produced as identities in opposition. This chapter explores how Southern middle class American White girls and young women grappled with the identities of lesbian and good girl. As they distance themselves from the “deviance” of “lesbian” and position themselves as “good,” they affirm class expectations and rely on class privilege to (re)assert their value.

Smith, M. (2015). It’s a balancing act: The “good” teacher and the “Ally” identity claim. Educational Studies, 51(3), 223-243.

ABSTRACT: This study examines teachers’ narratives about their support of LGBTQ students and their reasons for enagaging in this work. The teachers represented here are past participants of the Reduction of Stigma in Schools—a professional development program that aims to provide teachers with knowledge and tools that will empower them to create affirming environments for LGBTQ students.  Interview data indicates that the role of the teacher “Ally” is being understood as a figure of care and respite, and teachers are invoking gendered, idealized constructions of the “good teacher” in their descriptions of students’ needs and negotiations of institutional resistance.

Payne, E. & Smith, M. (2014). The big freak out: Educator fear in response to the presence of transgender elementary school students. Journal of Homosexuality, 61(3), 399-418.

ABSTRACT: Increased visibility of transgender children requires elementary school professionals to take on issues of gender diversity and by association, sex and sexuality, which are considered taboo in elementary school spaces. School professionals who have worked with transgender children were interviewed about their experience with these students, perceptions of their school’s success in supporting them, and recommendations for information and resources needed by schools to provide support. Findings indicate that fear and anxiety are common educator responses to the presence of a transgender child and the disruption of the gender binary, and these emotions are limiting the possibilities for schools to affirm transgender identity.

Payne, E. & Smith, M. (2013). LGBTQ kids, school safety, and missing the big picture: How the dominant bullying discourse prevents school professionals from thinking about systemic marginalization or…Why we need to rethink LGBTQ bullying. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1(1), 1-36.

ABSTRACT: The “problem” of LGBTQ students’ school experiences has been shaped by discourses where “overly individualized and psychologized analyses…distort larger issues of inequality” (Pascoe, 2007, p.17) and research examining youths’ negotiations of social hierarchies is neglected (Ringrose, 2008). Interventions include behavior management and protection for victims but overlook “the role that schools play in the reproduction of social relations along axes of class, gender, race and…sexuality” (Youdell, 2005, p.250). LGBTQ identities are positioned as sites of risk and vulnerability, and LGBTQ youth are only acknowledged as victims in need of protection and care (Fields, 2013). Cultural privileging of heterosexuality and gender normativity goes unquestioned, LGBTQ marginalization is reproduced and re-entrenched in new ways, and schools avoid responsibility for complicity in LGBTQ harassment. This paper explores educators’ stories of LGBTQ harassment and how dominant bullying discourses are shaping educators’ understandings of the needs of LGBTQ students. We propose a new definition of bullying to create a more useful framework for understanding the social nature of peer-to-peer aggression and designing interventions to address the cultural roots of this aggression. Finally, we take the position that a majority of peer-to-peer aggression in U.S. public schools is some form of gender policing, and we believe bullying must be redefined to account for relationships between peer targeting and structural inequalities.

Payne, E. & Smith, M (2012). Rethinking safe schools approaches for LGBTQ students: Changing the questions we ask. Multicultural Perspectives, 14(4), 187-193.

ABSTRACT: Conversations about the creation of safe schools for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth often focus on eliminating individual acts of bullying and harassment targeting queer kids and fail to address the ways in which schools value and validate hegemonic gender.  As a result, “current interventions…tend to conceptualise the problem of bullying in terms of individual or family pathology” (Bansel et al, 2009, p. 59), rather than examining the systems of power that persistently privilege specific groups of youth while marginalizing others.  This paper aims to accomplish three goals: (1) Respond to the questions most often asked in discussions of safe schools for LGBTQ students using a sociological frame which views schools both as cultural sites in which students position themselves in terms of power- marginalizing those who do not conform to heteronorms –  and as institutional structures and systems in which hegemonic gender and sexuality are privileged. This perspective is largely unconsidered in discussions of violence in schools in the United States. (2) Explore the possibilities and limitations of litigation and legislation for creating change in schools.  (3) Propose a research agenda that moves beyond defining “the problem” in terms of individual-to-individual or group-to-group interactions and, rather, identifies school culture as the object of inquiry.

Payne, E. & Smith, M, (2012).  Safety, celebration and risk: Educator responses to LGBTQ professional development.  Teaching Education, 23(3), 265-285.

ABSTRACT: Research has explored multicultural teacher education from multiple, sometimes divergent perspectives, yet these studies agree that what passes for multicultural teacher preparation is often “ not multicultural at all” and focuses on “celebrating diversity or understanding the cultural  ‘other’ rather than a commitment to educational equity” (Gorski, 2009, p. 309).  This paper is part of a larger evaluation study of Reduction of Stigma in Schools—a professional development program aiming to empower educators to create affirming environments for LGBTQ youth.  Interview data indicate that though workshops utilized a critical approach, what teachers embraced was a call to understand and “protect” LGBTQ students through the “safety” discourse –a form of understanding and valuing the “cultural other”—and investment in one time “visibility” or “celebration” events as symbols of improved school climate. Further, educators framed LGBTQ issues as “risk” issues rather than as equity issues, which continue to mark LGBTQ students as “victims” or “problems” in need of saving or solving.  We posit that responses to RSIS content reflect educators’ understanding of their obligation to “diversity” as presented during their teacher preparation programs and that workshop content which resonated with them was that which they could easily fit into these familiar frameworks.

Payne, E & Smith, M. (2011). The Reduction of Stigma in Schools: A New Professional Development Model for Empowering Educators to Support LGBTQ Students. Journal of LGBTQ Youth, 8(2), 174-200.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes the rationale and design of The Reduction of Stigma in Schools (RSIS)—an innovative professional development program that aims to empower educators to create supportive learning environments for LGBTQ students.  Part of a larger evaluation study, this paper illustrates how the core design components are visible in participants’ experiences with the program itself and with working to create supportive environments for their students.  Key design elements, such as the educator to educator program delivery, research based workshop content, and basing the program in a university school of education, were reported by participants to significantly increase the perceived relevance of LGBTQ issues for their professional practice. The paper concludes with reflection on the design elements which have proven effective, plans for expanding the model, and recommendations for actions educators can take to move toward supporting LGBTQ youth.

Payne, E. & Smith, M. (2010).  Reduction of Stigma in Schools: An evaluation of the first three years. Issues in Teacher Education, 19(2), 11-36.

ABSTRACT:The Reduction of Stigma in Schools (RSIS) program began the work of educating school personnel about the school experiences of LGBTQ youth in Fall 2006 and reached the “1000 educators trained” mark in September 2009. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and this study explores the experiences of those who participated in the RSIS program over its first three years.  The goal of the larger project was to identify successes and areas in need of improvement and to gain understanding of the meaning teachers make of their workshop experience in terms of their professional responsibility.  This paper explores portions of the research relevant to the three workshop objectives and other evaluative data offered by educators on their experience.

QuERI Related Payne Publications

Payne, E. (2010). Sluts: Heteronormative policing in the stories of lesbian youth, Educational Studies: Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 46: 3, 317 — 336.

Payne, E. (2009).  Lesbian youth and the “Not Girl” gender:  Explorations of adolescent lesbian lives through critical life story research. Methods on the margins: Doing the subversive in educational research. Edited by Winkle-Wagner, Lawrence, and Hunter. Palgrave MacMillan.

Payne, E. (2009). Stand up, keep quiet, talk back: Agency, resistance and possibility in the school stories of lesbian youth. Section IV, Gender, sexuality and social justice in education. In The Handbook of Social Justice in Education. Edited by W. Ayers, T. Quinn and D. Stovall. Taylor & Francis.

Payne, E. (2007). Heterosexism, perfection and popularity: Young lesbians’ experiences of the high school social scene: Educational Studies: Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 41(1): 60-79.